The School of Beauty and Charm

by Melanie Sumner

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

This is the story of the Peppers family of Counterpoint, Georgia. Henry and Florida Peppers are pertinacious Baptist parents whose dearest wishes are to keep their asthmatic son Roderick alive and their smart-ass daughter Louise from going to hell. Louise, the little hellion, tells the story.

And what a story it is, about how ponderous Henry, hysterical Florida, and hell-bent-for-rebellion Louise, awash in grief after Roderick's death at fifteen, go on living. Steady-at-the-helm, Henry buries himself in his work managing Southern Board, the local cardboard factory. Flamboyant Florida, with a fine-honed knack for losing her cool, redecorates their custom-built house, the Aerie, and takes up painting by numbers. Louise indulges her addictions: at nine, she discovers vanilla extract. After Roderick dies, she adds liquor, food, sex (at sixteen, she seduces a Southern Board laborer), and out-and-out danger, finally, at eighteen running off to join the circus (a carnival, actually). Louise gets to be the clown.

THE SCHOOL OF BEAUTY AND CHARM is a daring novel that walks a fine line between high comedy and real tragedy. But at heart, it is a moving portrait of a father and mother, two good-hearted people doing everything wrong to win back their daughter.

Release date: September 28, 2001

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

I WAS BORN AGAIN, for the first time, when I was seven. That year smiley faces covered the country and people ended conversations with “Have a nice day.” In March of that year, a string of tornadoes whipped through Counterpoint, Georgia, lifting pine trees as if they were birthday candles stuck in a cake, then scattering them willy-nilly across the roads. Houses flew to new yards, and cars sailed through the sky like lost kites. Dogs landed in trees; cats went bald, and hamsters left the hemisphere. For the entire month, the wind whirred and sucked with relentless fury. It was obvious, at least to the Baptists, that God had taken out His vacuum cleaner. Clearly, He had found me, Louise.

“Remember who you are,” my father warned me each time I left the house. Not one to leave anything to chance, he would add, “You are a Peppers.” Then he straightened his shoulders and smiled hard, demonstrating the posture of a Peppers facing the world.

Pepperses are white, not albino or Swedish or anything like that, but regular white. We are also white on the inside. Except for my mother, Florida, who is high-strung, we never raise our voices or blow the horn of an automobile. We have no rhythm, and when we watch others dance, we tend to blush. Spicy food burns our tongues. Every other November, we vote Democrat, which, down South, used to be the same as voting Republican. Florida is always careful not to cancel Henry’s vote by voting for a different candidate. The whole family avoids discussing sex, politics, and religion, favoring the topic of the weather, which averages seventy-five degrees in Counterpoint year-round.

A Peppers is smarter than the average bear, as Henry likes to point out, with a stern reminder to be grateful because God could just as easily have given our brains to other people. According to Henry, most folks don’t have a lick of sense. He doesn’t know how they survive. There are a few people smarter than us—geniuses, probably, but they don’t have much personality.

That’s how God made the world; Henry doesn’t know why. God is white, upper-middle class, and Southern Baptist. He has sideburns like Henry, and small, straight, white teeth like everyone else in our family, but whereas the Pepperses are on the short side, God stands about twenty-one feet tall. Inside Bellamy Baptist Church, His head grazes the faux cathedral ceiling, forcing Him to bend down to see His flock up close. He wears square glasses from Revco and one piece of jewelry: a gold Masonic ring. In His back pocket He carries a small black comb and an ironed white handkerchief. He drives a four-door Ford without electric windows.

God’s son, Jesus Christ, looked like a Hell’s Angel in every picture I ever saw, but Florida explained that these portraits were done long after His death and may not have been accurate. “Jesus lives inside of you,” she said. “Your body is His house.”

For some reason, perhaps because we received extra portions of brain, God made all Pepperses tone deaf. I swear that Henry sang “Home on the Range” to me when I was a baby, but no one believes me. Every Sunday morning at Bellamy Baptist, we’d rise from our pew bench and lip-synch, lifting our chins and stretching our mouths wide to accommodate the whole notes. Florida made herself the exception. With her shoulders back, eyes bright, and red mouth open, she emitted a brave warble, having once done so in a beauty contest before walking away with the Miss Western Kentucky title.

Had anyone in the family been albino, it would have been my brother, Roderick, who had asthma and could turn so pale he was almost invisible. According to our local psychiatrist, Leo Frommlecker, Roderick was the Lost Child. I was the Clown, perhaps because of my ears, which were unusually large and also pointed. Neither Henry nor Florida cared to be diagnosed. All the same, as Florida pointed out, Roderick was regular white because albino’s have pink eyes.

None of us has brown eyes or big noses or kinky hair. Originally, we all had straight, thin, mouse-brown hair, but Henry has lost most of his worrying about everybody, Florida has her coif dyed a different color every month, and Roderick’s hair sprang into nervous curls when he entered the Middle School at Bridgewater Academy. Then, by an act of will, he went so blonde that it was difficult to spot him in the sun.

“The boy got the hair,” Florida would say whenever she introduced me. Then, straightening my collar and tucking a few strands of hair over my pointed ears, she would sigh and admit, “She looks just like Henry.” If the other person said “I see the spittin’ image of her mother,” the introduction had been successful.

Florida was a Deleuth before she was a Peppers, so she is not exactly like the rest of us, but she has a knack for imitation, and after she had been married to Henry for a couple of decades, you could hardly tell she wasn’t the real thing. The biggest difference between the two families is that a Deleuth grew up under the instruction “You’re a Deleuth, so you won’t amount to much,” while the Pepperses constantly remind each other that despite any temporary setbacks, we are Pepperses.

Both families come from the same stock: inbred European royalty with criminal records, weathered and further inbred in the hills of Appalachia. Henry and Florida are the only members of their clans to leave Kentucky without dying first. As soon as they were married, they blazed out of the state in Daddy-Go Deleuth’s ’58 Ford pick-up, with a black-and-white TV, a Kirby Lady Deluxe vacuum cleaner, and a salted ham strapped down in the back. Florida wore a pillbox hat and gloves; Henry wore wing tips and smoked a Louisville cigar. They were headed for Georgia.

“Mark my words,” said Grandmother Deleuth. “Florida will git above her raisin’s.”

IF YOU’VE EVER heard of Counterpoint, Georgia, you probably read somewhere that it consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other town in the world, or that a member of the band KISS attended Bridgewater Academy. Someone might have mentioned that the freshman class at Maude Wilson College for Women boasts a virginity rate of 73 percent. None of it is true.

Counterpoint, governed by the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, is indistinguishable from any other Southern gothic town: oversized magnolia trees line the streets, a dinky mall attracts wayward youth, and on every other block, the statue of a Caucasian male on horseback scowls at the enemy. Some locals swear they’ve seen an alligator in the New Hope River, grown to a ponderous length of six feet on Moon Pies and light beer, but the water is too cold for gators. All the same, her name is Earnestine.

The New Hope River divides Counterpoint into the beautiful and the ugly. On the beautiful side, there is the Maude Wilson College for Women, founded in 1876 by the former plantation owner, Colonel P. Wilson. Wilson’s real name was Tony Ritto—a lowbrow thief who was run out of Italy with a donkey’s tail pinned to his pants. Upon his arrival in Counterpoint with a hundred slaves handpicked on Goree Island in West Africa, the colonel donated a statue of a howling wolf to the courthouse on Front Street. Inscribed on a gold plaque at the wolf’s feet is the inscription in bocca al lupi, crepi! which literally translates “In the mouth of the wolf, eat it!” It means “Good luck.”

In the summer, Officer Fitzpatrick patrols Front Street on a bay mare with a braided tail. The hooves strike bricks hand-made by the colonel’s slaves, klop klop. Officer Fitzpatrick patrols the street from Wanda’s Wig Shoppe down to Spivey’s Drugs—both run by an all-female, white-trash family—and back again, looking at his horse’s reflection in the windows. The odor of sizzling hush puppies fills the air, and sometimes, as the sun sets on the muddy river, a ray of light flashes onto the golden wolf at the courthouse, lighting up her emerald eyes. Cats stand sentry on the porches of millhouses painted in lemon, cherry, and vanilla, iced with gingerbread trim. Down by the river, an old black man wearing a suit raises his face to the blue sky and sings in a deep, sonorous voice, “Jesus is tenderly calling thee home. Call-ing to-day.”

Turning onto Mansion Street, a broad avenue lined with dazzling white monstrosities vying for our annual DAR Most Beautiful Home Award, you can still hear the old man singing “Call-ing to-day . . .”

OUR HOME SITS on the beautiful side of the New Hope River, but not in the Historic District, atop a hill called Mount Zion, so high that clouds pass beneath our windows. From the roof of our house, we can see across the river to the virulent spawn of Frenchie Smartt’s empire: the glaring tin roofs of Smartt’s Gas Station, Smartt’s Liquor Store, and Frenchie’s Bar; the gash of Smartt’s Junkyard. Over this skyline rises the purple smoke plumes of Southern Board, the corrugated board plant where Henry has been general manager for nearly half a century. Most people think that Southern Board stinks, but as Henry will patiently explain, it’s the paper mill next door to his plant that has an unpleasant odor. This situation exemplifies his theory that a lady’s reputation is formed by the company she keeps, but Henry does not himself make that connection. In any case, it’s just paper, and if the wind was right, it smelled like money to me.

With Henry’s money, the help of a succession of hare-brained architects, and the counsel our local interior decorator, Shirley Frommlecker, Florida created a house unlike anything ever seen in Counterpoint. It had no front or back, that anyone could locate, and the ceilings were painted while the walls were left bare. Since no one ever helped her carry groceries into the house, Florida designed an electric dumbwaiter, which never worked right and finally had to be dismantled, leaving Henry with the constant fear that one of the children would fall down the thirty-six-foot shaft, break his neck, and become a paraplegic. It was Henry who tactfully suggested the intercom, in hopes that Florida would not need to holler at the top of her lungs to someone in another room, but after lightning struck the house twice, the intercom only functioned on LISTEN—allowing unlimited eavesdropping. There was an alarm system that was not connected to anything and could not be heard by the neighbors because there were none. About once a month a bird would set off the alarm, driving us all into the same room in a frenzy of adrenaline-powered family feeling whose aftermath left us sheepish and surly.

Owl Aerie, Florida named the house. When the last shingle had been nailed down, she sent a photo of Owl Aerie to Grandmother Deleuth in Red Cavern, Kentucky. Grandmother was seventy that year and attending a funeral every other week. At the Farley Brothers Funeral Home, she unsnapped her musty, black pocketbook and with trembling, spotted hands, passed around the photo. Everyone agreed that it looked just like a barn. Uncle Lyle, the evangelist, said, “It’s a wonder with all that money Henry’s making, he can’t buy him a coat of paint.”

The house was built in the seventies, when Shirley Frommlecker was reaching her peak as an interior decorator. Henry, conservative by nature, kept a tight reign on her in the upper regions of the house, where he slept, ate his cereal, and read the Wall Street Journal in the bathroom, but in the basement, she and Florida went wild. No one in Georgia really had a basement, being mostly Baptists and avoiding the underground. Instead, on the lowest levels of our houses, we built small dank bedrooms for boys and assigned the rest of the space to recreation rooms, called rec rooms for short.

Our rec room, where I had my first religious experience, had orange indoor/outdoor carpet, a billiard table, and some furniture Henry would not allow upstairs: a pair of black-and-white vinyl hassocks designed to look like dice, a lime-green bean bag, and a white vinyl couch accented with leopard print pillows. To create the illusion of light, Shirley covered one wall in mirrored tiles. For added interest, she mirrored the ceiling, and hung psychedelic suns that twirled in the steady draft of the air-conditioning.

Henry never could get used to the strings of aqua beads that replaced a perfectly good door. In the doorway, he’d hesitate, as if trying to decide exactly where to part the beads, and after he entered, he’d wipe his arms. He called the room “your mother’s love den.”

Shirley insisted that Florida hang her acrylic copy of Femme au Miroir over the couch, and Florida obliged, even though she didn’t think it was her best work. “I want to do something original,” she said. “But I’m not creative enough.”

“Oh listen to you! Florida, yes you are,” said Shirley.

Shaking her head, Florida straightened the canvas on the wall. “I guess you can’t really tell that’s a bosom.”

“Not unless you’re looking for one,” said Shirley. She urged her to replace the gray La-Z-Boy recliner with a Jacuzzi, but Henry put his foot down.

“You could wear your bathing suit,” argued Florida. “You just don’t want to get wet.”

“Shirley likes to play with other people’s money,” said Henry. “Let Leo Frommlecker read a soggy paper. I haven’t noticed a Jacuzzi in their house.”

“What’s wrong with the Frommleckers?”

Henry mumbled something behind the stock page.

“What did you say?” demanded Florida.

“I said, he’s a nut, and she’s showy.”

“You are prejudiced against the Jews, Henry. Tell the truth.” In reply, Henry crackled the paper.

“You’re as repressed as you can be,” said Florida, but she couldn’t get another word out of him.

OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, Henry was nice to everybody. That was his job. Besides being the best general manager Southern Board ever had, he was chairman of the Counterpoint Chamber of Commerce, president of the Elks Club, chairman of the board at the Counterpoint Bank, treasurer of the Rotary Club, deacon at the Bellamy Baptist Church, a Mason, a Boy Scout leader, and a member of the board at the Three Bears Country Club. “I don’t enjoy any of this,” he explained to Florida when she complained that he was inattentive at home. “It’s how I make my living.”

Florida did her work out of pure love for her family, even if no one appreciated it. She did a lot. Aside from her regular janitorial duties, KP, and a weekly wash, dry, and fold, she ran a twenty-four-hour on-call taxi service for Roderick and me. She chauffeured us to and from Bridgewater Academy, Boy Scouts, Brownies, the Royal Ambassadors for Christ, Girls in Action, ballet, tap, trampolining, soccer, Junior Thespians, Bible School, Beginning Wilderness Survival, Hooked on Books, Intermediate Macramé, and anywhere else we needed to go to enrich our lives or pass the time. She was never late.

She wrote notes to our teachers, ran security checks on our friends, typed our papers, watched our language, and disposed of our dead pets. She decorated the house for every holiday, baked a cake for each birthday, and got Henry to take his socks off when he went on vacation.

Henry was a good provider, once he got kicking, but Florida was convinced he would sleep all day if she wasn’t there to get him out of bed. Usually, she had to call him three times. Her work wasn’t over when he wandered into the kitchen in his bathrobe, smiling sleepily at the box of cereal she had set at his place at the table. Throughout the day, she urged him to stop dilly-dallying and procrastinating. She picked out his secretary’s Christmas gift, tolerated his boss’s dumb jokes, and turned the news off at night when he fell asleep in his chair. She wore lipstick and a good bra for him every day of her married life.

On the rare occasion that Florida went out of town, even for a day, our lives came to a halt. We’d sit around in silent, unlit rooms, with glazed eyes, as if we’d been unplugged from our current. Eventually, Henry would offer to open a can of tomato soup, but we were usually too apathetic to eat.

Florida did not limit her activities to Earth. Although Jesus said, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you,” Florida was a stickler for making reservations. At least once a day, twice on Sundays, she prayed for our salvation. On Saturday night, she pressed our clothes for church and set our shoes on a piece of newspaper by the back door for Henry to polish. In the morning, she curled my hair and made sure that I did not leave the house without a slip on under my dress. “We want to look nice for the Lord,” she said.

In her spare time, Florida painted. She used acrylic paint because oil takes too long to dry and is hard to clean up. Once, Henry suggested that she wear rubber gloves while painting, to keep her hands unstained.

“Artists don’t wear gloves,” she answered tartly.

“Well I didn’t know,” he answered. He had never paid much attention to art, but he considered her renditions of Starry Night, The Last Supper, and Femme au Miroir, almost as good as the originals, and of course, much less expensive.

Florida performed her jobs so well that no one really noticed them, but three times a week we followed her into the beige interior of Bellamy Baptist Church because Henry told us, with a doleful face, “It’s the least you can do for your mother.”

Although much of the architecture in Counterpoint has enough historic significance to warrant a plaque, Bellamy Baptist Church was built to appear eternally new. It is beige, inside and outside: beige brick, beige trim, beige carpet, beige pew cushions. Since stained-glass windows don’t come in beige, we compromised with pastel, which shine weakly in contrast to the brilliantly colored windows of the Catholic church next door. Those windows pour their heathen colors through our pale glass, and sometimes, in bright sun, red and purple light slashed across my hands as I ran them along the beige pew cushion.

I longed to be a Catholic. I wanted to drink wine instead of Welch’s grape juice, wear a rosary, and have a huge cross hanging on our living-room wall, bearing a plaster Jesus who looked like he’d been in a motorcycle wreck, his blue eyes rolled up in agony, blood dripping down his flat, white belly. My best friend, Drew St. John, was a Catholic, and she had class. Until the tornadoes hit, and Jesus called me, I was privately planning to join the St. Johns in hell.

Although I had broached the subject of my salvation with Florida and Henry several times, I had never received a satisfactory reply. “If I’m not born again, and I die suddenly, will I go to hell?” I asked. They babbled all sorts of evasive nonsense back at me, but the answer was plain from the worried frown on Florida’s face. Sometimes, when Henry wasn’t around, she’d hiss, “The devil’s got hold of you. Do you want to end up with him in hell?”

To appease her, I’d say, “Oh, no. I want to go to heaven,” but I could only envision endless beige carpet.

EVERY YEAR IN Counterpoint, the Daughters of the American Revolution sponsor a tour of homes. Each year they traipse through half the choice new residences in town, noting pet stains on stair treads, unappealing shower curtains, odors of diapers, whiskey, or take-out food. Then they return to Mansion Avenue, where they select the same five white mansions they put on tour every year.

Still fuming from Red Cavern’s dismissal of her house, which Grandmother Deleuth had dutifully shared over the phone, Florida was determined to present Owl Aerie to the DAR. Henry balked, but he lost like a gentleman, and after locking up his financial records and personal correspondence, hiding the contraceptives, and polishing the forty-one plaques of recognition on his study walls, he left the enterprise alone. He was at work when Lacy Dalton, Regina Bloodworth, and Shirley Frommlecker arrived. Although Shirley was not in the DAR, she was rich, and as our official decorator, she took the privilege of showing the house—“To drum up business,” Henry said.

From my vantage point on the roof, I watched the Frommlecker’s tank roll up our steep driveway and disappear behind a bend of crepe myrtle, where it stalled out. For a few minutes, the sound of birds was drowned in Lacy Dalton’s shriek, punctuated by Shirley’s exclamation, “Isn’t this the most original thing you’ve ever seen!”

In a low voice that carried straight up to the roof, Regina said, “Indeed.” Regina had been legally blind in both eyes for a decade. When relatives urged her to have corrective eye surgery, she turned up her nose. “Hospitals stink,” she said. “Besides, I’ve seen everything. None of it is as interesting as what I can imagine.” A pillar of the DAR, Regina accompanies her friend Lacy to each of the residences seeking admission to the Tour of Homes, and Lacy considers her input invaluable.

“Hold on to your hats, ladies!” cried Shirley, as she gunned the machine back into gear and brought it to a screeching halt at the back door. She drove the only Tracked Troop Carrier in town, given to her by Dr. Frommlecker after she had wrecked two Lincolns. Sliding across the roof on my belly, I dipped my head over the edge to watch as Shirley, wearing a paisley skirt and a turban, directed the women away from our garage door and onto the raised walkway that crosses a cactus garden and eventually leads to the disguised front door. Lacy Dalton, who is shaped like a watermelon, wore a wraparound kelly-green skirt covered with watermelons, a watermelon-pink blouse and matching espadrilles. She tottered along with one hand on her hip so that Regina could hook her long thin arm through Lucy’s short fat one.

Regina always wore black, so that she could dress herself. She kept her silver hair cut short above her ears, like a man, and despite everyone’s warnings that one day she’d be knocked down and robbed, she adorned her person with half a million dollar’s worth of jewels. Even her cane glittered with diamonds as it tapped along the planks. She smelled faintly of rum and vanilla. With their arms linked, the two women walked in practiced synchronicity behind the turbaned Shirley, who was talking a mile a minute. From the corner of my eye, I saw the white flash of Roderick’s hair in the sun. He was hunting lizards beneath the trampoline. Silently, I descended the dogwood tree.

“I kid you not,” Shirley was saying over her shoulder. “There she stood, in the middle of Front Street, at ten o’clock in the morning, naked as a jaybird. Agnes had just done her hair.”

“Frenchie Smartt’s girlfriend?”

“Live-in. I can’t recall her name.”

“I know I’ve seen her. The one with the bosoms?”

“Of course I didn’t stop the car, but I can tell you that she wears an underwire bra.”

“What goes up . . .” said Regina.

“Lawdee,” said Lacy, turning serious. “Someone really ought to do something about her. I mean, having a cocktail is one thing . . .. . .