The Queen of October

by Shelley Fraser Mickle

Genres: Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book. When Sally Maulden is sent to her grandparents in Coldwater, Arkansas, she believes that she's too boring to be loved. But in this small town she finds love from unexpected sources. "Bursting with warmth. I didn't want it to end."--Chicago Tribune.

Release date: June 5, 1992

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

1.

My Parents Return Me

That strange and crazy year began in the last hot days of August. It was a year that would stretch and spread into what would nearly be two, and yet it stayed in my memory as a single time. It was like the whole world, as I knew it, blew up and got replaced by something like a distant cousin. A hunger for change seemed everywhere. It was in me, and in the sudden jolt that sent my mother and father to a lawyer. It sat in Coldwater, Arkansas, like a cicada waiting seventeen years underground to be born and sing. It rode in the crazy, mixed-up heart of Sam Best, who told my mother he loved her one day in her kitchen while I was hiding in the pantry. And it began soon after I discovered that no one would ever love me, no one at least outside of family—and they had to.

It was 1959, and I was thirteen.

“Sally! I can’t find them! I just can’t find them.”

I was sitting on the steps of my mother’s apartment house in Memphis. It was one week before school was to start in Coldwater, Arkansas, and I was being sent there. “I haven’t seen them,” I said. My mother had misplaced the car keys—probably because she tried to file her life away in Mason jars.

“Damn!” A jar hit the floor and broke. A blast of cuss words was followed by quiet. Then the screen door opened. “You didn’t hear that, did you?”

“No’m.” I knew better words myself. I even knew how to put them together better. When my mother moved me into the junior high in Memphis, I’d gotten put into the least-filled classes—the worst—“sucking hind tit,” as Coldwater farmers would say. And I ended up sitting on the back row with already fully mature boys in Elvis hairdos and leather jackets who knew how to cuss better than anybody I’d ever heard.

“Here, sweetie, look through this, will you?” My mother set a Mason jar on the top step. For driving me to the Trailways bus station, she had on a hat, gloves, stockings, the whole works. So did I. She’d made me wear my Easter outfit—a full-skirted sundress with a jacket, one-inch heels, gloves, and a hat with streamers. The dress was made out of blue dotted swiss that, when I rubbed my hand across, reminded me of heat rash. And because the concrete step was hot enough to fry an egg on, I was having my clothes pasted to my skin with sweat. I felt like the paper doll of some berserk child who’d glued my clothes on. I’d never get to change. And yet, more than anything, that’s what I wanted.

For something had happened to me. I’d learned to behave as everyone expected. I was known as “sweet.” But I sat on anger. I could be right in the middle of a room feeling mean and outright murderous, and not a living soul would even get a hint. In fact, I was as boring and predictable as the tobacco-colored spots that darkened all over my face whenever the sun came out. The only comfort in looking like a speckled bird dog, or an Appaloosa horse, was that, at thirteen, I didn’t have zits. At least only a few. Apparently freckles and pimples are like termites and carpenter ants in the same house. It’s hard to have both at once.

“They’re not in here,” I said, putting the receipts and stuff back in the Mason jar. “Try your old purse,” I suggested. Earlier she had changed to a dressy one.

“Maybe so.” She turned around and went inside. Then she came back and stood at the door, leaning out it. “Sally, where did I put my old purse?” Tears were making streaks through her powder and rouge like a water pistol shot onto a chalkboard. I stood up to follow her inside. Her crying was aimed at the car keys, but I knew it came from what was going on in her life, and also from the fact that, after today, I’d be gone.

For you see, it was not only the year I discovered I was ugly and unfit for anybody, outside of blood kin, to love; it was also the year my parents decided to try a divorce. It was the year of our Big Bust-up. Back then, divorce was worse than having both parents killed in an airplane crash, or by cancer. Either of those would have stirred up a good amount of pity. But as a victim of divorce, I felt tainted. And it seemed not so much a tragedy as wickedness falling upon us.

But The Bust-up was going to be okay. My mother said that. In fact, she said it a lot. Probably The Bust-up was just a blessing in disguise, seeing as how I was so homely-and was going to have to lead an unconventional life, anyway. I could see only two routes left for me: to be an old maid or a tart—and I was leaning toward the second. So The Bust-up was just right for getting me used to not being hooked up to anybody—at least for long.

In fact, I was busy making plans on how I was going to make it in the world, alone, since as far as family was concerned I was like someone who was being put out on the side of the road, halfway to somewhere. I vowed that as soon as I got out of this family for keeps, I’d never do anything to get back into another one. Instead, I was going to go on out to Hollywood and get into the movies.

So that strange and crazy year began like the world had suddenly sped up and stopped, sending us sprawling into new, uncertain space. Something was pushing us. It was like a hunger for a food we could not name. It kept us awake and aimed us for places we did not know. And it began with me walking around in the final countdown of The Bust-up, thinking up places for the car keys. “I just can’t understand how I could have lost them!” My mother’s voice was one inch from a total downpour that would make us both feel worse. I quickened my search like a kid at a church Easter egg hunt.

I was being returned to Coldwater because when my parents agreed to file for divorce, they started fighting over who would raise me. I was flattered that my father would want to. Finally it was arranged that I should stay with my grandparents in Coldwater until the judge who was handling their case could decide where I should end up: with my mother or with my father. Since we’d moved from Coldwater only the year before, I’d be very much at home. In fact, Coldwater was exactly where I wanted to be—anywhere but in that stupid Memphis junior high where kids wore tiny clothespins on their collars and no one talked to me, and the homecoming queen walked around in an angora sweater over false tits with a poodle on her skirt. Lord!

My mother found her purse under her bathrobe on the bed. She dumped it out, making a nest of ticket stubs, makeup, and Kleenex. “Hot damn.” She looked at me, licking tears off her lips, holding up the keys like a just-caught fish. “Well—I mean, at least I found the darn things.”

So finally we were out the door for keeps, and she turned around and straightened my hat—that straw job with streamers down the back. As soon as she took her hands off it, I tipped the whole thing whankyjawed again. I would have torn everything off and prissed down the street buck naked—embarrassing my mother to insanity—but we were late already. Probably it was a good thing my mother and I were splitting up. We’d been getting on each other’s nerves a lot lately.

I slid into the backseat of her car, which was a 1949 station wagon with side panels of honest-to-god wood that sadly now were turning black like a ripening banana. Soon we were tooling down Central Avenue to my father’s rooming house to pick him up. He wanted to show a lot of interest in me so he’d have a fighting chance with the judge. Even though nobody special would know he was in the backseat on this day, it could be important. For instance, there could be witnesses: his landlady maybe, or the ticket-teller at the bus station.

I stared at my mother’s hair, swept up and pinned on top of her head, the color like October maple leaves. She was still a glamorous woman. Her earrings were almost as large as her ears. If she ever needed a hearing aid, she would have the perfect spot for a secret installation.

“Jeez,” she said, “just look at that,” pointing to the passengers waiting at a bus stop. We had entered the block where my father’s rooming house was, and we were stuck in traffic. She glanced back at me. “Don’t you think that looks just like Tyrone Power?” My mother had an eye for good-looking men. That was one thing, she said, that had gotten her mixed up with my father. He was so good-looking he never had to do anything but stand around and get looked at, and so he didn’t learn anything about being good at small talk. The wrong kind to get married to, she told me. But neither of us could help it: we stared at the bus stop.

What she’d said was both sad and impossible. Because Tyrone had died suddenly in Spain the year before. And my mother, of course, would know all about that. She was a singer. She was off to revive that career, minus me and my father. Or, at least, minus my father. If she got me, I was supposed to travel with her.

There had been four other children in her family, and her father had promised each of them two years at the local teachers’ college. What she should have done was teach in one of the little towns throughout the South, as every nice girl mostly did, and there marry some nice man from a land-rich family. But not my mother. She took the name Boots—Boots LaMar—and joined a Glenn Miller-type band and toured four states of the South.

One Saturday night in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where my father was at an insurance company convention, he went into a supper club and heard my mother sing “Moon over Miami.” Somehow that did it. And ever since, my parents’ romance kept being re-stuck and revived by that song about a city none of us had ever seen. But lately the music hadn’t been working. And now we had to go and divvy up everything.

I had read four or five select passages from Peyton Place and every volume of The Black Stallion books, and was well prepared for understanding anything. But why couldn’t they get along?

One day the summer before, when we still lived in Coldwater, I’d gone into the pantry for some jelly when I heard my mother offer Sam Best a cup of coffee. He was the richest man in Coldwater, and there was never a time when I didn’t know him. He and my mother came into the kitchen; and as Mr. Best began changing the subject from what he wanted in his coffee to his desire for my mother, I closed the pantry door except for a crack. What I saw and heard came back at strange times. So maybe while I was sitting in eighth-grade geography in Memphis in October, I would see, in the map of Africa, Sam Best’s hand closing over my mother’s as she stood at the stove. I could hear his deep, as-though-smiling voice saying he would love her, no matter what, and forever. He had cradled her against his large and wealthy chest while she cried out of frustration and unhappiness. She would, she said, love my father in spite of everything, and forever, too. That, she added, was the real tragedy of her life.

But why, if that day in the kitchen my mother loved my father so, would she file for divorce ten months later?

Once Bobby Watts, who was part of my sordid past in Coldwater, told me my father had the hots for some woman in Searcy. But my mother said the trouble was, my father couldn’t get excited about anything—except maybe her driving. If I had known why exactly we were busting up, maybe I could have fixed it. Surely somebody could have fixed it. But nobody understood what was happening enough to explain it to anybody else. It was just an all-over outright Bust-up. Probably I should have long ago put it on my list under World Wars I and II, The Origin of Life, and Why Elizabeth Taylor Married Eddie Fisher. But for the life of me, I just couldn’t. It had to make more sense than that.

I looked out at the traffic and the pavement, the people waiting at the bus stop. Nobody was busting out of line or running their cars up on the sidewalk to get away from traffic. They’d have been nuts if they had, or else downright mean and meant for prison.

I watched the people, sweating and moving with good reason—slow, but with good reason. The stoplights and the white lines and the bus stop—it’d all been planned and made sense. It came to me then that the real answer for The Bust-up was there, suddenly clear, and in the backseat with me. It was me. It was my fault. I was boring and plain. And there were probably a million other things about me nobody could stand to be around anymore. I should have known that. I should have known that all along. Of course it was me. Now that made sense. I was the reason.

I guess that meant, too, that even blood kin didn’t have to love me.

“I’d given up on you,” my father said, opening the car’s back door. He slid in beside me and put his arm on the top of the seat over my shoulders. He was dressed in a dark suit, tie, hat—the whole works.

“We got detained,” my mother said. She glanced in the rearview mirror. We could see her lips pressed into a tight line because she was concentrating hard. My mother didn’t like to pass anybody, but she loved to change lanes. Usually we just ended up riding like a sucker-fish next to the rear fender of the car in the next lane. Right now she was trying to stick us to the black fin of a Cadillac. “Go up or come back,” my father said. But she told him if he didn’t keep quiet she was going to put him out.

She’d threatened me the same way during all of my wiggling childhood, and never once had I had to call a cab. But with my father it might be different. I couldn’t predict anything anymore. My whole past seemed now like a paper bag I’d blown up—that they’d busted. I watched my mother raise her white-gloved hand and gesture to a man in a Mack truck, then smile and gun to the space he made in front of him.

“You’re going to wear this car out,” my father said.

“Fat chance,” my mother said. “It’s already shot.”

The Mack truck’s air brakes farted, and it turned.

My mother glanced at us in the rearview mirror. “That’s one of the things on the settlement list.”

“What?”

“A new car.”

“A new car?”

That was the first time I had heard a car was on the same list with me.

But my father only laughed and said he’d get her an Edsel. That was the car advertised for the man on the way up. I guess nobody wanted to admit he was only on the way up, because nobody was buying the car. My father’s suit pants were losing their creases and growing small round spots of sweat. Why he and my mother had moved from Coldwater only a year before, I wasn’t sure. From what I knew, my father got a job in an insurance company in Memphis, specializing in farm equipment, just about like the one he’d had in Coldwater. So his job didn’t have a darn thing to do with it. The truth was, I think, my parents were hoping if they moved their marriage might improve. My grandparents did live next door to us in Coldwater, and my parents’ marriage was a bit on stage. And, too, maybe my mother feared Sam Best’s love for her might lead to scandal. But if my father was to raise me, I knew I would probably be returned to Coldwater. He’d move back, or leave me with my grandparents. My father believed in little towns.

He took me, when I was ten, to the Coldwater River that had given the town its name, and we’d gotten in a boat and fished. I knew he’d always wanted a boy. But I guess he and my mother never got together long enough to make one. So if they were stuck with me, I was willing to fish. In fact, I even found out I liked it. I got the hang of it and was on my way to a second bream until I cast my line in an oak tree and fell out of the boat and scared away the fish. We had to go home then, on account of my wet clothes and all. And whenever I asked about going again, my father always said, “Not today.”

I looked at him there beside me in my mother’s car. If I could have fished better, maybe we’d all still be together in Coldwater.

The sidewalks looked hot and I watched the burnt August grass and the little houses all in a row, sickening sweet with people inside. I thought that every one of those houses with a family together in one spot, with TV moms and dads and stupid kids with names like Beaver, ought to be found out and dynamited. I folded my hands into my lap, and in the blue rash of dotted swiss I made a silent joke—a mean kid’s finger play I’d learned walking home one summer from Bible school in Coldwater: “Here’s the church. Here’s the steeple. Close the doors and mash the people.” A laugh came up and sat on my lips like a high-diver poised and counting for courage.

In no more than an hour I’d be out in the world. And on my own.

But thank the Lord! For the real truth of the matter was, I just flat out didn’t need a family. And besides, I was going to Coldwater.

I loved Coldwater about like a kid loves the circus. There wasn’t a road leading out of it that I hadn’t at one time or another been on. The cotton fields around it, the land in summer that was as green as dollars, then faded in winter to wheat brown, lying flat—to me, it was home.

Yet there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary or even the least bit special about Coldwater. I’d been driven through lots of little cotton towns and each one of them seemed to be just about like it. At certain times of year, the whole town could almost disappear under a coat of dust that turned everything to the color of putty or well-chewed gum. Some of the streets weren’t paved. And there was no stoplight.

In fact, Coldwater was, I guess, just about as plain as I was.

2.

Sam Best Appears

The Trailways bus station was in the middle of a block downtown. I felt like a dummy in my Easter outfit next to the dingy benches and floors, the sleeping folks, and the sign warning: “Fifty Dollar Fine for Spitting.”

“One ticket to Coldwater, Arkansas,” my father said.

“One way or round trip?” the teller asked.

“One way,” my mother said and pulled off her gloves. Then she looked at me and asked, “You know why?”

Sure I knew why. They were going to drop me off and be rid of me. But I guess she felt guilty about it. She leaned over and whispered, “After the trial, I’ll have a new car and I’ll drive over and get you.”

The ticket-teller handed the ticket to my father and looked at me. He was, of course, a potential witness for my father. He was fat and his hair was gone.

Thinking about that—the trial, and the whole big mess of the fight over me—made me realize another truth. In fact, it hit me square between the eyes about like a wad of spit gum. Until then I’d been too dumb to even see it. My daddy didn’t want me. Not really. He was just using the fight for me to diddle my mama. It’s not like he and I really had a future together or anything. It’s not like we’d spend a lot of time yucking it up on fishing trips. “Let’s get a Coke,” my mother said.

“How about some ice cream?” My father cuffed me under the chin as though we were members of the same team in the locker room. I didn’t even need to answer. Saying nothing was as good as saying yes. Lord! we were all such good actors. I could have committed murder over being smack in the middle of a Bust-up. It was a funeral I was forced to attend. But we were all acting so damn good about it—which, if you really wanted to think about that, was sure a fine sign for me. For after going through this, it ought to be a snap to knock ’em dead in Hollywood. Then my father said he thought he’d go right down the street to a café and get us some butter pecan. After he left, my mother said: “Well then, let’s just get us a magazine.”

I followed my mother to the newsstand. While she thumbed through a fat issue of Life, I looked out onto the street. Somebody was getting out of a cab and reaching back in for shopping bags. I could see her back, bent-over and broad. The black sturdy lace-up shoes she had on seemed familiar to me. I’d watched those shoes and those exact feet, standing just like now, somewhere in my past in Coldwater. But where or why I couldn’t remember.

I wasn’t expecting to know anybody at the bus station. I figured my mother didn’t need witnesses. Almost anybody in Coldwater would come to my parents’ trial and testify that she was good to me. It wasn’t really her style to plant a witness anyway. She probably wasn’t even going to trial. No doubt she was planning to let me rot it out at my grandparents’ until I was thirty-five or forty, and then she’d come back with her million gold records. She’d sell my story to Modern Screen, about how she’d had a daughter so ugly she’d had to hide her away in a cotton town in Arkansas.

“Let’s get this one,” my mother said, handing me the fall issue of Seventeen, which had a model on it in wool clothes so hot that the thought of them just about gave me a heat stroke.

While my mother paid, I watched the back of the lady in the black lace-up shoes as she hurried into the bookshop across the street. She was half covered up with shopping bags. Something about the way the back of her hair curled looked familiar too. I knew that people in Coldwater seemed to have a special talent for going out into the world and bumping into each other. Once the Second Baptist preacher ran into the owner of the Soybean Plant at The House of Vestal Virgins in Rome, and it was written up in the Coldwater Gazette, which started a whole new trend of people writing in to say who they’d seen where when they’d least expected it.

On the other side of the waiting room my mother aimed for the Coke machine. By now it was obvious my father was having trouble finding some place to buy ice cream. And he wasn’t giving up. So we were sitting on a bench looking out the front window of the bus station, sipping Cokes out of bottles and thumbing our magazines, when somebody else from Coldwater dropped in. Only this time we knew only too well exactly who it was.

“Mercy,” my mother said, getting up. “Sam!” She laughed nervously. “It’s been ages.” They hugged.

“Do you know how long really?” he said. “Thirteen months and three days.”

“Well.” My mother glanced at me. I was still sitting down, holding a Coke. “I guess that’s right. We left just about this time last year.” She laughed, a low bitter laugh that ended flat. “It didn’t do us a lot of good though, did it?” She smiled at him and looked away. “I guess you know Hodding and I are breaking up.”

“S’what I heard,” he said. They both sat down, one on each side of me.

Sam Best wore a dark striped suit over a white shirt. He was tall, big through the shoulders, yet lean and sort of leathery. To me he looked like someone who rode the range, and owned it. He even had cowboy boots, dark with tooling, made out of alligator or lizard, sometimes with silvery scales like snakeskin. Today they were black and seemed new. Some people in the bus station glanced at him, then stared for a moment.

People in Coldwater said Sam Best could charm tattoos off sailors and sell you a piece of chewed gum for a dollar. A year before he’d flown to New York and been on “I’ve Got a Secret.” He’d stumped the whole panel by being a millionaire from Arkansas. So if people didn’t recognize him, they stared on general principles.

I turned to look at Mr. Best’s face. He noticed me and winked, then reached into his pants pocket, while hiking himself up off one thigh to rattle his change. “I’m really sorry to hear about you and Hodding,” he said, looking from me to my mother. “But then again.…” He smiled—a boyish sort of grin—and reached into his other pants pocket. “Might be for the best.” He pulled out packages of cigarettes and peppermints. After he offered them to my mother, he held out the candy to me. He always carried mints, sourballs, or chocolate kisses that melted in his pockets, causing wads. As my mother held the cigarette to her lips, Mr. Best reached over me and flicked on his lighter.

“Sometimes,” my mother said, blowing out smoke, “you just can’t fight it anymore.”

Sam Best shook his head. He stood up and walked to the front window. Taking off his suit coat, he threw it over his shoulder. The muscles in his back moved under the thin cloth of his shirt. In the inside pocket of his coat, I caught a glimpse of a silver flask. And then he folded the lining to hide it. He came back and took the chair beside my mother.

“I want to say something to you now that I want you to think about, really think about,” he whispered—which sounded to me like the beginnings of something right intimate.

My mother reached for an ashtray and crossed her legs. She said, even though she didn’t look at Sam: “You been over here to the cotton offices?”

He stared at her, then at me. It was obvious they were bothered by my being there. So they were just going to change the whole subject. “Yeah. Front Street,” Sam Best said, getting. . .