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Mary, in Need of Belle
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Copyright © 2013 by Brian S. Wheeler
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Mary, in Need of Belle
“Mary!” Mother Kay screamed as the smallest of her young daughters clung to her skirt in the trailer’s confined spaces. “Mary! Check in on Queenie before the bus gets here!”
Mary, the oldest of all of Kay’s many daughters, failed to finish the sentence she tried scribing in her leather diary. The rapping of her mother upon her door shook the thin walls and prevented her from inking a consistent stroke, and Mary appreciated good penmanship. She took pride in the patience little things demanded. Thus, though Mary hated calling on Queenie, she ceased scribbling her entry for fear of marring a diary page with uncouth cursive.
Mary peeped out of her door. “What does she want this time?”
Kay counted a breath as her daughters ran around her ankles. “She’s just old, Mary. Just check in on her and make sure she’s comfortable. She asks for you every morning.”
Mary grunted. “She might ask for me, but I’m not the one she wants to see.”
“You take her fables too seriously,” Kay rolled her eyes. “You’ll be lucky to be as pleasant when you’re almost a century old. See then if you don’t talk a little nonsense from time to time.”
Kay ceased the argument and chased a pair of her girls down the trailer’s hall. Mary clenched her fist and gathered her courage. Her mother might argue to the contrary, but Mary knew better than to discount Queenie’s superstition.
Mary drifted a little further down the trailer’s hall, where Queenie shrouded the windows in thick curtains to resist the sunlight. The smell of clove cigarettes drifted to her from beneath Queenie’s door. Mary feared Queenie would set the trailer ablaze upon all of Kay’s daughters one morning with those burning cigarettes left untended in the ashtray beside the old crone’s bed. But not even Mr. Christensen challenged Queenie’s habits. Queenie’s old money paid more than a little of the trailer’s rent. Queenie’s old money silenced many a rumbling stomach among Kay’s daughters. Queenie said nary a word when her dimes fit the bill for one of Mr. Christensen’s fine bottles of scotch. No matter how dangerous Mary considered the old dame’s habits, Queenie maintained an influence throughout the trailer no matter she seldom left her room.
Mary hoped her asthma didn’t flare as she stood in the smoke drifting from beneath Queenie’s door. “You awake, Queenie?”
A hacking and a weezing voice answered. “Belle? Is that you, Belle?”
Mary vowed to show no hurt. This time she would show a little of the spine Queenie didn’t believe she possessed.
“It’s me,” Mary forced some mirth into her reply. “It’s only Mary.”
“You tell me all I need to know girl,” replied a cracking chuckle. “Come on in anyway. Your mother won’t give me any peace if I don’t let you come in my room and check on my breathing.”
Though small, Queenie’s room represented an envied luxury in the trailer. Kay currently suffered her third marriage. Her first husband, and Mary’s father, was a sloven, drunken man killed one night outside of a tavern over accusations of sleeping with one too many of mankind’s other wives. Kay’s second husband, father to the twin daughters Lily and Rose, was a raging bull of a man prone to the cursing and the violence. Kay discovered his corpse suffocated one morning in bed, with the strange, purple bruises upon the neck forming the shape of a small child’s hands.
Kay then married Mr. Gerald Christensen, who played guitar and performed nasal country tunes each Friday night at the bar and sweet gospel each Sunday morning at the firebrand chapel. The third marriage gave Kay four more daughters in the span of five years: silent Lucy, laughing Mindy, crying Kylie, and deaf Darla. Kay’s seven girls spilled from the trailer’s windows. They sprinted out of every opened door. They tripped throughout the hall at all hours of day and night.
Though all of Kay’s daughters choked the space of Mr. Christensen’s trailer, Queenie kept a room all to her own. Kay had inherited her maternal side’s great dame while young, a collision of truck and station wagon taking the life of her mother before Kay graduated from high school. Queenie had changed little in that time. The dame remained as ill-tempered as ever.
Money always followed Queenie. Her investment portfolio filled with profitable stocks, bonds and dividends Queenie chose with an instinct many a broker felt unnatural. She collected silver and gold, and only Queenie’s mind knew all of the bank deposit boxes filled with diamonds and pearls she leased from Decatur to Metropolis. Queenie’s checkbooks were never overdrawn. Queenie’s temper was foul, but her coffers kept the girls’ stomachs quiet and their wardrobes warm no matter how many mouths sprang from Kay’s womb.
Mr. Christensen liked neither youth nor old age. Yet Kay remained a beautiful woman, and Mr. Christensen’s blood beat so passionately for the mother whose daughters crowded his home. Mr. Christensen overlooked the presence of those girls sired by men other than himself as long as Queenie paid for their needs. Mr. Christensen did not mind giving the trailer’s third, cramped bedroom to Queenie, nor did he mind the trinkets the old woman cherished, as long has he and his Kay remained interlocked through the night on the water bed on the trailer's opposite end. Let Kay's daughters wiggle for sleeping room wherever they might find it. Mr. Christensen could ignore the smoke of clove or the sound of Queenie’s radio cackling through the night, as long as Kay’s old grandmother kept paying so many bills.
Mary believed many of her classmates’ rooms held walk-in closets larger than the room reserved for Queenie in the trailer. A short bed occupied every i
nch of the wall immediately to the side of the entrance. Mary thought only Queenie’s crooked limbs could fit in the short bed. An antique dresser hulked along the far wall. Its large, oval mirror scraped the trailer’s ceiling. Piles of books obstructed the glass’s reflection. The books were senseless to Mary, written in the hand of her dame’s old country, filled with woodcuts illustrating strange, pig-headed men and scowling, squatting hags. Many a book had fallen to the floor, or flooded onto the poker table squeezed between the foot of the bed and the dresser that held Queenie’s small television.
Queenie’s strange trinkets filled whatever space remained. Kay dismissed those items as mere signs of an eccentric woman’s developing dementia. But Mary feared another compulsion behind the collection of those trinkets. She feared the motivation that gathered the dried scorpion corpses, the shriveled chicken claws, the jars filled with the pickled eyes of crows.
Queenie squinted upon Mary as that daughter of Kay entered the room. “What do you think about that smoke?”
Queenie laughed. Her pleasure was short-lived as the effort hurt her. Age had not yet introduced death to Queenie, but the years had not forgotten her. Translucent tubing sneezed from Queenie’s nose into an oxygen tank next to bed’s headboard. Mary could smell the slight odor cast by the colostomy bag hidden just beneath the top blanket. Cataracts clouded Queenie’s eyes. Her arms sported a hide of tiny, blue bruises and purple, broken veins. Queenie’s laughter changed to choking in a few seconds, and Mary hardly hid her smile.
“Oh, I’m still keeping my distance from the cigarettes,” Mary answered. “Doesn’t look like you’re able to smoke them.”
Queenie shook her head. “Belle’s favorite brands are always cloves.”
Mary wished the smell of those cigarrettes would simply vanish if she closed her eyes. The smoke reminded Mary aware of how closely Belle lingered to the trailer. The smoke stoked Mary’s fear. Did she feel Belle lurking at the end of the street? Was Belle hiding in the bushes or trees , waiting for her chance to arrive, unseen, upon the trailer’s threshold? Would Belle rasp upon the window that night when Mary gave herself to dream? The smoke drew Belle closer, and Mary thought Queenie cruel for keeping a clove cigarette burning next to the bed.
“Belle’s not returning,” Mary growled. “The smoke won’t be enough.”
Queenie’s smile was nearly toothless. “Oh, I remember all of Belle’s favorite things.”
Mary’s lips quivered. “I hear my bus.”
“Nonsense,” Queenie’s eyes sparkled at the sight of Mary’s discomfort. “Do me a kind favor before you run out. If not for me, then do it for your mother. Help me tune in my show on my little television on the table.”
Mary answered defensively. “You don’t need me to do anything to that television. You can’t see anything.”
“But I can hear it fine. There’s not much more for an old thing like me stuck in bed. Show me a little kindness, and move those rabbit ears until we find channel thirteen.”
Mary had suffered much hurt from the tongue of the old dame, and she wanted desperately to find some acceptance in whatever shape a heart as old as Queenie’s might give. She too believed in magic, and so she reached to the television’s antennae hoping one kind errand would be enough to convince Queenie to forget about Belle.
“That’s it, girl,” Queenie wheezed. “I can hear it clearing.”
Queenie always refused Kay’s offer to install cable in the room. She always said she thought invisible waves beaming black and white pictures into her room more impressive than something a wire might supply. Queenie relished the unseen with fascination. So Queenie depended upon Mary to twist the small television’s antennae while her ears listened to the static clear.
“You impish child,” Queenie grinned. “That’s not the station I’m looking for, and you know it. Now, tune in to what I tell you.”
Mary grunted, clicking through the television knob as the sound of static popped.
“Ah that’s it,” Queenie sighed a few seconds before the static cleared and voices filled the room.
Mary inched away from the poker table and gazed into the black and white screen. A rerun of a cheap, afternoon talk show vomited its drama in the glass. A pair of heavy women spewed vulgarities at one another as their tight dresses stretched and ripped as they leaned forward to scowl at the cameras and claw at each other’s hair. The thin host stoked the women’s ire by aiming questions pertaining to paternity at a gaunt and pale man sandwiched between such feminine mass. The man answered in a screech of a voice, sending the large women spitting and scraping anew at one another. Security rushed to the stage, and the audience cheered as the melee escalated to elbows to chins and kicks to crotches.
Queenie choked as she laughed.
“This stuff is awful,” Mary groaned.
Queenie smiled wide. “Don’t matter what you or me think of the entertainment. This here show is Belle’s favorite program. It has more of her fire running through it.”
Mary's hands shook. Queenie’s eyes gleamed at the sight of Mary’s trembling, and the great-granddaughter’s knees nearly wilted in the gaze. Mary gathered what conviction remained to her and held her chin high, no matter her quivering lips, as she hurried out of Queenie’s room.
Once in the hall, Mary stepped onto young Kylie’s hand, who wailed and ran about the trailer.
When it finally arrived, Mary didn’t care where the bus might take her. Mary only wanted the get as far away as she could from her mother's trailer crowded with so many daugthers.
Mary peeked out of the windows as the bus pulled away from her home. She could feel Belle getting closer. She felt the burn of Belle’s eyes on her back. She looked over her shoulder on the playground, sure to see Belle about to overtake her.