Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [67]
One afternoon Anna Lee said to Betty Raye, “I know you are real religious and all that but would it be a sin for you to go to the movies? Ginger Rogers is from Missouri and I’m just dying to see Kitty Foyle again. It wouldn’t hurt you to go just once, would it?”
Betty Raye thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ve never been.”
When Dorothy found out, she said, “Now, Anna Lee, I don’t want you to be pushing Betty Raye into doing things she might not want to do.” Anna Lee, who was busy at the moment braiding Betty Raye’s thin brown hair into pigtails, said innocently, “I’m not, Mother. She wants to go, don’t you?”
Betty Raye, sitting at Anna Lee’s dressing table, said, “Yes, ma’am.” The next night Anna Lee took her to see Kitty Foyle and she loved it.
That Friday Dorothy drove the two girls over to Poplar Bluff to get Betty Raye some new glasses. When they got home Dorothy said to Mother Smith, “You should have come with us—you would have gotten the biggest kick out of Anna Lee. You would have thought she was Betty Raye’s mother, the way she was carrying on.”
Mother Smith said, “Did she get a new pair?”
“Finally,” said Dorothy, sitting down on the sofa. “They should be here next week. Anna Lee picked them out. Blue plastic with sort of wings on the end. It’s not the pair I would have picked but that’s the pair Anna Lee wanted and that’s what she got. Betty Raye is the sweetest girl; she just sat there and let Anna Lee stick every pair of glasses they had in the store on her and she never said a word.”
It was true, Anna Lee was enjoying her newfound project, pushing and pulling at poor Betty Raye, trying to make her into a version of herself. If she had had another few weeks she might have even taught Betty Raye to jitterbug. But the day finally came when she had to leave for nursing school. That night the whole family went down to the train station to see her off. On the way over, Dorothy talked too much and tried her best to be brave, but at the last minute, when Anna Lee, looking so smart and grown up in her brown hound’s-tooth suit and hat to match, climbed on the train and turned around and waved, she could no longer control herself. She put her hand over her mouth to hide a sob and watched the train pull away and she broke down completely. Doc put his arm around her. “Come on, now,” he said, “it’s not for that long. She’ll be back at Christmas.”
“I know,” Dorothy said, “but she just looked so little on that great big train,” and she almost broke down again. She knew she was being silly but she couldn’t help it. It hurt just as much to see her daughter go off as it had on her first day of school twelve years before.
Bobby was also sad to see Anna Lee go but he didn’t know what to say, so he said, “That was a dumb hat she had on.” When they got home Dorothy went to bed, Bobby went to his room and listened to the radio, and Mother Smith helped Betty Raye quietly move her things into Anna Lee’s room as she had promised. Hanging up Betty Raye’s dresses in the closet, Mother Smith said, “Betty Raye, you just don’t know what a godsend you are to Dorothy right now. If you weren’t here, I’d hate to think what she would do. She lost one child and I know how it hurts her to lose another, even if it is just for a short time.”
Doc and Jimmy sat out on the porch and did not say much. But after a long silence Doc finally offered, “I just wish Dorothy wouldn’t act like it was the end of the world. She’ll be back at Christmas, for heaven’s sake.” He then looked at Jimmy and shook his head. “Women . . . the way they carry on, you’d think a few months was ten years.”
“Yeah, they get pretty upset over things, don’t they?”
Both men sat there in the dark and smoked, trying to pretend that they were above such silly emotions as missing Anna Lee. But they weren’t.
Anna Lee had been on the train about two hours when she found the envelope Doc had sneaked into her purse without telling