Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [75]
Mother scolds, “Betty!” but she laughs louder than I have heard since Daddy was alive.
I’ve worked my way over to the edge of the crowd of jammed-together kids. I’m jumping up and down on my tiptoes, but I can’t see Troo, who I can usually spot easy because of her hair.
I would love to see Henry, too, but my boyfriend can’t come to the festivities because he could get stuck in the eye with a flag on a stick, which really happened once. Henry started bleeding and went white, and then a little blue around the mouth. The nurses at St. Joe’s gave him a special decorating badge before they sent him home with some extra blood. So he can’t come for the decorating and eating part of the party, but he can see the fireworks from the safety of the drugstore stoop. I’ll stop by on our way home and we can talk about our favorites.
Thank goodness, there’s Ethel. She really sticks out because she is so big and brown. She’s not with the other grown-ups, who are lounging around the refreshment booths. She’s up on the hill, looking down at where the zoo used to be. I’m dreading seeing what she’s seeing, but I really need to talk to the smartest woman I know. I also might be able to see Troo from up there. I know her. My sister wouldn’t skip one of the biggest bashes of the year even if she is, as Ethel would say, “fit to be tied” over the annulment news.
Ethel’s not in her white nursing dress. She’s got on a skirt of some kind of print I’ve never seen before. It’s many shades of green and very jungly. On her top half, she’s wearing a pale pink blouse that sets off her skin below her broad-brimmed hat that’s got fruit hanging off it. She looks scrumptious. I bet her boyfriend, who is standing next to her, would love to take a bite outta her. His entire name is Raymond Buckland Johnson, but he lets Troo and me call him Ray Buck the same way Ethel does. He is almost too handsome to look at without blinders. His hair doesn’t have coiled bounce the way Ethel’s does. He wears it parted on the side, slicked with something that looks like it’s never gonna dry out called pomade, which is the colored version of Brylcreem. Ray Buck is the snappiest dresser. Crackling crisp, always. Today he’s got on a snowy white shirt and matching pants and loafers that are a cool blue. Ray Buck goes over the moon for shoes. He doesn’t get them at Shuster’s, though. Negroes have their own shoe shops in the Core.
“Happy Fourth!” I shout to them when I’m a few feet away. Ethel spins around at the sound of my voice and says, “Well, look who we got here, Ray Buck.” She plants her hands on my shoulders and doesn’t seem surprised to run into me even though she is pretending she is. “Don’t you look like a breath a mountain air this mornin’, Miss Sally?”
She expects me to answer, “How kind of you to say so,” which I do, even though I probably look more like a breath of midnight in the swamp in my seen-better-days cutoff shorts and wrinkly yellow T-shirt. In all the excitement, Mother didn’t remember to braid my hair so it’s loose and snarled up. Ethel is just being polite, as always. When she opens up her school with her secret inheritance that she’s gonna get from Mrs. Galecki’s Last Will and Testament, by the time she’s through with them, the children who are lucky enough to attend will be able to beat out Miss Emily Post when it comes to manners.
“How do, Miss Sally,” Ray Buck says with a little bow and I go swoozy. If Ethel didn’t adore him and I hadn’t already promised to marry Henry Fitzpatrick, I would ask this bus driver to wait for me even though that is dreaming a dream that can never come true. Negroes cannot marry white people, but if they