Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [18]
“I don’t even want any!” I protested. But I did like the enticing smell, which awoke me early in the mornings.
My aunt made waffles with oleomargarine. She kneaded a capsule of yellow dye into the pale margarine.
“It’s a law,” she told me one morning.
“They don’t have that law down home anymore,” said Mama. “People’s turning to oleo and it’s getting so we can’t sell butter.”
“I guess everybody forgot how it tasted,” said Aunt Mozelle.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if that business about the dye was a Communist idea,” said my uncle. “A buddy of mine at the plant thinks so. He says they want to make it look like butter. The big companies, they’re full of reds now.”
“That makes sense to me,” said Mama. “Anything to hurt the farmer.”
It didn’t make sense to me. When they talked about reds, all I could imagine was a bunch of little devils in red suits, carrying pitchforks. I wondered if they were what my uncle had seen in the Pacific, since devils had tails. Everything about the North was confusing. Lunetta Jones, for instance, bewildered me. She came for coffee every morning, after my uncle had left in a car pool. Lunetta, a seventh-grade teacher, was from Kentucky, and her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, so Mozelle and Boone took a special interest in her welfare. Lunetta’s life was tragic, my aunt said. Her sailor-boy husband had died in the war. Lunetta never spoke to me, so I often stared at her unself-consciously. She resembled one of the Toni twins, except for her horsey teeth. She wore her hair curled tight at the bottom, with a fluffy topknot, and she put hard, precise g’s on the ends of words like “talking” and “going,” the way both Sharon Belletieri and Betsy Lou did. And she wore elaborate dresses—rayon marquisette dresses with Paris pockets, dresses with tiered tucks, others of tissue chambray, with what she called “taffeta understudies.” Sometimes I thought her dresses could carry her away on a frantic ride through the sky, they were so billowy and thin.
“Lunetta’s man-crazy,” my aunt explained to me. “She’s always dressed up in one of them Sunday-go-to-meetin’ outfits in case she might come across a man to marry.”
Uncle Boone called her thick lipstick “man bait.”
—
The buses remained on strike, and I spent the days in the house. I avoided Sharon Belletieri, preferring to be alone, or to sit entranced before the television set. Sometimes the fading outlines of the characters on the screen were like ghosts. I watched Milton Berle, Morey Amsterdam, Believe It Or Not, Wax Wackies, and even Blind Date. Judy Splinters, a ventriloquist’s dummy with pigtails like mine, was one of my favorites, and I liked the magician Foodini on Lucky Pup better than Howdy Doody. Betsy Lou teased me, saying I was too old for those baby shows. She was away most of the time, out on “jelly dates.” A jelly date was a Coke date. She had jelly dates with Bob and Jim and Sam all on the same day. She was fond of singing “Let’s Take an Old-Fashioned Walk,” although one of her boyfriends had a car and she liked to go riding in it more than anything else. Why couldn’t he take us to Detroit? I wondered, but I was afraid to ask. I had a sick feeling that we were never going to get to see the buildings of the city.
In the mornings, when there was nothing but snow on television, and the women were gossiping over their coffee in the kitchen, I sat on the enclosed porch and watched the people and the cars pass. During the heat wave, it was breezy there. I sat on the rattan chaise lounge and read Aunt Mozelle’s scrapbooks, which I had found on a shelf above the television set. They were filled with brittle newspaper clippings mounted in overlapping rows. The clippings included household hints and cradle notes, but most of the stories were about bizarre occurrences around the world—diseases and kidnappings and disasters. One headline that fascinated me read: TIBETAN STOMACH STOVE DECLARED CANCER CAUSE. The story said that people in Tibet who carry little hot stoves against their abdomens in winter frequently develop