The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel Page 3
Chapter
2
Friday was pep-rally day. I spotted Mary Bennett at the top of the bleachers—our usual spot, underneath the scoreboard. She held a pen and a notebook, and kept staring into the crowd of students. She’d scribble something, and then gaze out again.
“What are you doing?” I asked as I planted my behind beside hers.
“Just keeping a little tally,” she said, brightly. I looked over her shoulder and saw a series of two-digit numbers on her pad. There were stars beside some of the numbers and frowny faces beside others.
“Ooooh! Thirty-eight,” she said, pointing at a player with a thirty-eight on his jersey. “Although sixty-nine would have been a better number for him,” she said with a wink.
“So it’s that kind of list,” I said, playing along, although the discussion of Mary Bennett’s “extracurricular” activities always made me uncomfortable, mainly because I was a total virgin and therefore didn’t have a whole lot to say about sex.
“All in the name of school spirit,” she said with a cackle. “If there is anything sexier than a football player’s butt, I’d like to see it.”
Patsy was ascending the bleachers, wearing a Minnesota Vikings sweater.
“Good Lawd,” Mary Bennett said. “Remind me to get that girl a sweater from Ole Miss.”
“At least she got the school colors right,” I remarked.
“Uff dah,” Patsy said as she sat next to me. “What a climb, eh?”
“Someone is going to ‘uff’ your ‘dah’ if you don’t quit talking like that,” Mary Bennett said, looking up from her notebook. “Repeat after me. Say, ‘I swanee that was a haul.’”
“Swanee?” Patsy said.
“It means ‘I swear.’ You say it a few times, and no one will ever guess you’re a damn Yankee.”
“You know, Mary Bennett, I am not a Yankee,” Patsy said, raising her voice to be heard over the crowd. “I may have been born up there but that’s ALL, and besides, Minnesota wasn’t even a state during the Civil War.”
“It wasn’t? You sure about that?” Mary Bennett said, a puzzled look on her face. “’Cause I coulda swore Massachusetts was right in the thick of things.”
“It’s not Massachusetts,” Patsy said. “It’s—”
“Looky, there’s Geraldine,” Mary Bennett interrupted. “Come on up here, darlin’!”
Gerald stood at the foot of the bleachers and shook his head.
“Y’all get down here!” he mouthed. “It’s an emergency.”
The three of us rose from our seats and zigzagged our way down until we reached Gerald, standing with arms crossed and his weight on his left leg.
“What’s wrong?” Mary Bennett said as she reached him. “You want to sit somewhere else?”
“No,” Gerald said. His mouth was a thin, serious line, and he was tapping his right foot rapidly as if bursting with pent-up energy. “We need to talk. Let’s sneak out different exits and meet at the usual spot.”
“Done,” Mary Bennett said immediately, obviously alarmed by Gerald’s uncharacteristically agitated state. She tucked her notebook under her arm and sauntered to the south exit. Patsy headed to the east exit and Gerald went west. That left the north exit for me, which unfortunately was guarded by Mr. Blalock, the school principal.
“Jill, where do you think you’re going?” Mr. Blalock asked, blocking my way as I tried to slink past him.
I arranged my features into an expression of acute embarrassment. “Omigawd, Mr. Blalock, I’m so embarrassed!”
“What is it, Jill? What’s wrong?” he said. He was dark and intense-looking, like Raymond Burr playing Perry Mason.
“I can’t begin to say it.” I covered my face with my hands. “It’s mortifying.”
“Just tell me,” he said, making an effort to be patient.
“Female troubles,” I mouthed, and then squeezed my eyes shut as if I couldn’t bear to see the impact my words would have upon him.
“Well, then, you just…uh…go right ahead and…uh…take care of that.”
“Okay, Mr. Blalock,” I said meekly as I slipped into the hall outside the gym. At my high school, “female troubles” was a magic password. If used judiciously, it could get you out of any activity and most trouble.
I scurried out a side entrance and headed to the vocational building. It was still warm, but there was a whisper of fall in the air.
My friends were situated in their usual places on the steps. Mary Bennett was smoking a cigarette, blowing fluffy doughnuts of white that drifted across the sky. Gerald was pacing in front of her, hands on his hips, thumbs forward, and Patsy was knotting her pale, wispy hair into a skinny single braid, thin as a ribbon.
“Finally,” Gerald said when he spotted me, stopping his pacing. “Have you seen Tammy today?” There was a note of accusation in his voice.
“No,” I said, swallowing nervously. I’d failed to save her from the Key Club massacre, and now I was going to have to admit it. I glanced at Patsy. “Was she in your English class?”
“A no-show,” she said. “And we had a big assignment due today.”
Gerald snapped his fingers at Mary Bennett until she surrendered her cigarette to him, and then he took a long, deep drag.
“Well,” he said, blowing out a great cloud of smoke. “After what Marcy did to her, I’m not at all surprised.”
The air crackled with electricity. Mary Bennett, Patsy, and I swapped a charged look and Mary Bennett’s arms shot out, her fingers grabbing at Gerald’s plaid pants legs, which were paired with a white patent leather belt. Very unfortunate fashion statement.
“You know what happened?” I demanded.
Gerald nodded slowly, like a man carrying an unbearable burden. “The whole horrifying story. Every nasty detail.”
Mary Bennett’s eyebrows arched ever so slowly upward. In a low, languorous voice, she said, “Do tell.”
“It’s all they could talk about during study hall,” Gerald said, his eyes narrowing as he looked at me.
“I tried to talk to her,” I said helplessly. “I really did. She refused to listen.”
Gerald sighed deeply. “I guess she was just doomed from the get-go.”
“Could we skip the previews and get to the main attraction?” Mary Bennett said, jiggling her knees with impatience.
Gerald said, “Well…it’s not the easiest tale to tell. Y’all are just gonna DIE when you hear it.” He took a deep breath and began. “Tammy showed up at the Key Club meeting, wearing that very same skirt she’d worn for the last few days. Marcy took one look at her and said, ‘Servants enter through the rear.’”
We all gasped. None of us had expected the guillotine to fall so fast.
“That ain’t the half of it,” Gerald said, holding up his index finger. “Tammy laughed, thinking Marcy was making some kind of joke, but when she tried to take a step into the house, Marcy blocked her path and said, ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Tammy stood there for a moment, confused, until Marcy winked at her. ‘Oh, I see,’ Tammy said. ‘This must be part of my initiation,’ which, of course, is exactly what Marcy wanted her to think, because it would drag out the ‘fun’ for everyone.”
“Assholes,” Patsy breathed. Gerald acknowledged the interruption with a sharp look.
“So our poor little Tammy went through the servant’s door and was ordered to change into a maid’s uniform. They immediately put her through the rich-bitch wringer, making her fetch their drinks, clear away empty plates, and wash the dishes. Finally, after a couple of hours, Marcy rang a silver bell and called the Key Club meeting to order—first piece of business, the admittance of new members, specifically Tammy Myers.”
“We can all guess what happened next,” Mary Bennett said, stretching out her long legs.
“Do you want to hear this story or not?” Gerald said sternly.
“Sorry, hunny,” Mary Bennett said, making a motion of locking her lips and tossing an imaginary key over her shoulder.
“‘Tammy Myers,’ Marcy said to her. ‘After observing you very carefully this evening, and seeing how helpful you were at our party, faithfully completing the lowliest task without complaint, we have come to our decision—Sergeant at Arms, may I have the bowl?’ Then Marcy paused a moment for dramatic effect, and looked Tammy directly in the eye. ‘Unfortunately, you were a little too good at your tasks. You demonstrated a familiarity with menial labor that we found quite disturbing and certainly not the type of quality we’re looking for in a Key Club member.’ She then lifted the cloth to reveal a glass bowl brimming with black chips. ‘Therefore, your application for membership has been unanimously declined.’”
Patsy moaned and clutched her face.
“It gets worse,” Gerald said, ominously. “According to Marcy, Tammy was so wigged out, you’da thought it was a bowlful of spiders. Then, and this is the most unbearable part, Tammy looked at Marcy and said, ‘I thought you liked me. How could you fake that?’ Marcy, of course, didn’t skip a beat. She smiled and said, ‘I do like you, Tammy. You’re one of the best maids I’ve ever had. But that’s no surprise, since you come by it naturally.’ Tammy’s face turned white and she hightailed it out the front door without another word.”
We fell silent. Gerald took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and swabbed his shiny forehead. Then he crouched down and collapsed against the steps as if completely spent.
“Shi-it,” I whispered, idly cracking the knuckles of my right hand. “I wish I’d done more to stop her.”
“Well, boo-hoo-hoo—that’s a real sad story.” Mary Bennett brushed off the back of her skirt as she got up. “But I don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to do about it.”
“What about starting our own club?” Patsy asked, her “about” sounding like “aboot.” “We could ask Tammy to join. It might make her feel better.”
“Club?” Mary Bennett said, with a frown. “What? Are we going to build a fort out of a refrigerator box, and put a homemade sign on the door that says ‘No rich bitches allowed’?”
Gerald and I laughed.
“Go on and laugh, but all we ever do is sit around here or Brent’s, complaining about our situations,” Patsy said, her brow knitted together. “Marcy and her friends might be terrible people, but at least they’re making things happen in their lives. They’re creating memories. Why shouldn’t we?”
All three of us stared at Patsy in surprise. We weren’t used to her saying much, prolly because when she did talk, she stuck out like a turd in a punch bowl.
“What sort of things did you have in mind?” I asked cautiously. “I mean, it looks like to me the only ‘memories’ they’re creating are horrible ones for other people—I don’t wanna do THAT. I don’t WANT to be like THEM.”
“Our own parties. Trips. Why don’t we forget that we’re not the In Crowd and just make our own fun together?” Patsy said.
“Come to think of it,” Gerald said, “we don’t do too many things together like other kids. Why is that, I wonder.”
Maybe because we don’t really think of each other as friends, I almost said but didn’t. It was our outsider status that had brought us together, not common interests or mutual respect.
“Maybe a club isn’t such a bad idea,” I said. “It could be fun.”
“Hold the phone,” Mary Bennett said. “The reason we started talking about a club was because we wanted to ask Tammy to join. Who’s to say she’ll want to fool with us bottom-feeders? She was aiming pretty high with the Key Club.”
“Yeah,” Patsy said, with a resolute lilt to her chin. “But after her ‘initiation’ story gets around, she’ll have nowhere else to go.”
“Except to be a loner,” Gerald said. “Let’s see, if being a loner is a fate worse than death, would hanging out with US be an even WORSE fate? I mean, look at us—we’re not THAT bad, are we?”
“We’ll just have to figure out a way to make ourselves and our club irresistible to her,” I said.
“How are we going to do that?” Mary Bennett said, her arms crossed in front of her chest. “Give away money at the meetings?”
A germ of a scheme was forming in my mind.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said with a sly little smile. “But I gotta warn you. It’s pretty damn crazy.”
Chapter
3
You look so FINE, baby, fine as WINE!” yelled a young man leaning out the window of a passing Camaro.
“I’ve never felt so adorable,” Gerald said, dangling his hand outside Mary Bennett’s Chevrolet Impala convertible. Gerald waved and blew a kiss in his direction. “Did you hear that?” he said, waving his hand in front of his face as if he were swooning. “I’m ‘fine as wine’!”
“Damn straight you are! But he was talking to ME,” Mary Bennett said, peering over the tops of her black cat’s-eye sunglasses with rhinestone detailing. We were all wearing them. Mary Bennett had bought each of us a pair at Brent’s Drugstore and charged to it her daddy’s account. “He never questions the bill,” she said. “I don’t think he even looks at it. Just writes the check.”
“Hey, Red! Wanta go to my place?” someone shouted as he streaked by in a banana-yellow GTO.
“Get the tag number of that car!” Mary Bennett shouted. Then she lovingly patted her long, curly red locks. “Who says ‘blondes have more fun’?”
We were all wearing matching long fiery red wigs (from the Ann-Margret collection) newly purchased from Sassy Styles in downtown Jackson.
“I’ve never had so much hair,” Patsy said, tossing it all around her shoulders. We were all fine-haired people (except for Gerald, whose abundant mane was too frizzy and uncontrollable to do him much good). Naturally, we couldn’t stop touching, flipping, and bouncing our luscious locks.
The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” was playing on the radio, and we were all singing along and blowing kisses and waving to passersby.
“It’s that house,” Gerald said, pointing to a white Greek Revival mansion set back on a hill. “The little road to the left goes to the cottage in back.”
“I hope this works,” Patsy said, checking her reflection in a compact mirror as Mary Bennett made the turn.
“How can it not?” I said, taking a swig from my bottle of Coke.
Mary Bennett parked in the gravel patch in front of a white structure that wasn’t much bigger than a band’s tour bus. It was small but welcoming, with shrubs and flowers that repeated the grand landscaping of the mansion, yet situated as it was in back of Jackson’s equivalent of a castle—well, one couldn’t help but feel the disparity, which I suppose was the point.
“I hope she’s home,” Gerald said, staring intently at the house, looking for signs of life.
“Somebody’s in there,” Mary Bennett said. “I saw a curtain twitch.”
None of us made a move to get out of the car.
“I’ll go,” I said, my voice thin and uncertain, even to my own ears. I glanced in the visor mirror, expecting to see my familiar timid self, but the sunglasses and red hair made me look like another person entirely.
“Here goes nothing,” I said, exiting the car and swinging my hips as I strutted. Mary Bennett yelled out, “Shake it, baby! Don’t break it!” which prompted me to exaggerate my walk even more.
I knocked on the screen door, straining to hear anything inside.
“Come on out, Tammy,” I coaxed. “We know you’re in there.”
Still no response. I was about to knock again, when I heard a slight rustling. Then the
door cracked open.
“Can I help you?” said a faint voice.
“Tammy?”
“Yes?” The door opened a little wider.
“It’s me—Jill.” I lowered my sunglasses. “From school.”
“Jill?” Tammy said. Her face was bare of cosmetics and her eyes were puffy, but she still looked very pretty. “Why are you here? Wearing that thing?” She pointed to my wig.
My plan, skimpy as it was, had been to flatter her into joining our little group, hence the wigs. They were meant to resemble her own big, beautiful tresses. It seemed like a fun (although somewhat silly) plan when I’d concocted it, but now, standing in front of her, I wasn’t so sure.
“I’m here to invite you to join a very exclusive society,” I said, trying to make my voice sound as confident as possible. “It’s called the Tammy Club.”
“What?” Tammy said. She opened the door all the way and stepped outside, blinking like a mole just emerging from its hole.
The others had gotten out of the car and were now standing behind me.
“We’re all charter members,” I said. “It’s called the Tammy Club because all of its members are named Tammy. That’s Tammy Gerald and Tammy Patsy from your English class and Tammy Mary Bennett. And I’m Tammy Jill.”
The others waved, flipped their hair, blew kisses, and pranced around like show ponies. They were truly getting into the spirit of things.
“Oh, and that’s the Tammymobile,” I said, pointing to Mary Bennett’s car, which had a banner affixed to the side that said OFFICIAL TAMMY CLUB VEHICLE.
“I don’t understand,” Tammy said, shaking her head in confusion. “Why would anyone have a group called the Tammy Club?”
“Because you’re fabulous and it’s named after you!” I said.
“I’m not fabulous,” she said softly, shaking her head.
“Yes, you are,” I insisted. “First of all, you have big, fat, beautiful hair. I, personally, would murder my own mother for such hair!”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Tammy said, looking even more perplexed.
“And it’s also because your name is Tammy,” Gerald chimed in. “Tammy is the best name in the universe. Everyone knows God didn’t make any ugly Tammys. They all have pert noses, small feet, and tiny waists.”