The Blues & Billie Armstrong 4
THE CLOTHES MAKE THE BOY
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
She gave me a mild lecture but never mentioned it to the other adults in the family. Still, I kept quiet about what I’d seen and heard in the dayroom. And what I’d taken. My face must’ve looked blank, no tears came.
I wanted a gray suit like I’d seen my father wear.
Grandma Junia drove me to JC Penney’s in Santa Rosa—two hours of twisted road, dusty oak trees and September hills. It was the first time I was allowed to ride in the front seat of her 1959 Buick Electra, a decade old already but still the closest thing to the Batmobile on the streets of Lupoyoma City. Angular and sleek, acres of windshield, space-age curves, great winglike fins over the taillights. Totally cherry and always waxed and polished glossy black, with white leather seats and chrome eyebrows over the headlights at the same sharp angle as the ones Grandma Junia drew on her face.
I studied her movements closely—the rise and fall and crinkle of her full skirt as her foot switched between gas and brake, her hands moving lightly but knowingly on the steering wheel, the silver painted fingernails that matched her frosted hair. I daydreamed myself in that driver’s seat, in full command of that shining blade of a car, climbing toward some heroic adulthood that would include facial hair and certainty.
She had an 8-track tape player and six or seven tapes in the glove compartment. You wouldn’t expect to find anything like Sad Hours in there. She wouldn’t even let me play the one old Beatles tape she had. She said it was “childish and common,” and she claimed the Columbia House Record Club had sent it by mistake. She liked the schmaltzy Big Band dance music of her youth—Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey.
But she also dabbled in West Coast Jazz, which she assured me was “highly sophisticated.” Grandma Junia had often complained that my cultural education was being neglected, and when we fell uncomfortably quiet she turned up Take Five by Dave Brubeck and counted the beats out loud to illustrate five-four time. “One-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five.” Because every twelve-year-old needs a lesson in odd time signatures on the way to buy a suit for his mother’s funeral.
The boys department at Penney’s had exactly one suit that almost fit me, and it was not gray. My hands disappeared into the sleeves when I held my arms straight down, and the pantlegs piled up on the tops of my shoes like rubble. Muttering into the dressing room mirror, I complained too loudly that the color was Dodger blue—clearly unacceptable for a born and raised Giants fan. Grandma Junia barged in with her arms crossed. “Archer Edward King! You will not attend this function in your worn-out school clothes. A boy your age without a decent suit—your mother should’ve known better! Now, this will do fine… and that’s that.”
Whenever Grandma Junia said that’s that, she would quickly brush her hands past each other and then open them as if she had magically eliminated the grime of complexity. And when Junia King said that’s that, well… that was that.
I stood beside my father, Grandma Junia and Aunt Laurette on the wraparound porch of Jones & Jones Funeral Home, a pompous Victorian on Main Street that had once been the Jones family home.
The white painted floorboards glared in the morning sun. I shifted foot to foot in my Dodger blue suit and watched my father shake the hands of the men who filed by in gray and black. I surmised that my function at this function was to establish my ability to shake hands appropriately—in other words, like a man. I kept my right arm cocked in the handshake position so my hand wouldn’t disappear into my sleeve, and I concentrated on shaking hands with each man—firmly, with level eyes and a straightened mouth. No crying.
My mother’s parents, Pop and Molly, arrived in their old Chevy pickup. Their real names were Edward and Mary Medina but most folks in Lupoyoma knew them simply as Pop and Molly, because they’d been around so long and had owned the Weeping Willow since I was “knee high to a crawdad,” as Molly would say.
Aunt Laurette hurried down the steps to greet Pop and Molly in the parking lot. Laurette had been a waitress at the Weeping Willow in her high school years, and she was the one who’d introduced my mother to her cousin Mike King. In that way, Laurette was the original bridge between the King and Medina families.
Pop always said Molly was “ninety-five pounds of gristle and backtalk,” but that day she looked shrunken and caved in, her tiny hands colorless against the black of her dress. Laurette guided her up the porch steps with a hand on her elbow. She rushed straight to me like I was a kindergartener with a scraped knee, and she pulled me close by the lapels of my suit and stood tiptoe to kiss me twice on the forehead. She was the only adult I knew who was shorter than me. She looked at my father and sighed and shook her head like she was disappointed. She started to speak, but her chin quivered, her eyes puddled, she bit her lip and looked away.
Pop came up the steps and walked right by my father as if he wasn’t there. He walked toward me, I put out my hand, and he shook it strongly and gripped my shoulder with his other hand. Pop seemed twice Molly’s size and his big calloused hand swallowed mine whole. He didn’t speak, but he locked eyes with me and I believed this was his way of lending me strength. Molly crossed herself and went crying into the depths of the funeral home, but Pop didn’t follow.
Grandma Junia was the only person who called Pop by his real name. “Edward,” she said, “you’re not going in to see your daughter?”
Pop shook his head. “No, not like that.” He looked Grandma Junia’s way, then swiveled to draw in my father’s attention as well. “But you two make sure and take a good long look.” He turned around, stepped down from the porch and headed back up the concrete path toward the parking lot.
“What’s wrong with Pop?” I said.
“He’s just upset, son,” my father said.
“With good reason,” Laurette said, and I thought yes, she was his daughter, his chiquitita, his little one.
But Grandma Junia said, “Oh hush, Laurette! As usual, you don’t know what you think you know.”
“Well, I only know what I read in the newspaper,” Laurette said. And maybe I should’ve wondered what she meant by that.
When we entered the viewing chamber I followed my father’s gaze across the room, where the casket was raised up on a collapsible gurney that reminded me of a sprung jack-in-the-box toy. He paused and wavered unsteadily in the doorway, lowered his head, ran one hand through his thick black hair. “Son, you don’t have to look if you don’t want to,” he said. I was surprised. It was unlike him to offer me such a hall pass, and I hesitated at the back of the room.
But Grandma Junia said, “No, it’s about time he got a grownup look at the way of things.” And she steered me by my shoulders, pushing me toward the open coffin.
My mother was dressed in moonlight blue, a double-breasted woolen jacket buttoned over a silky white blouse, a string of pearls at her neck. She looked ready for church or work or a trip on a train. I took a good long look, wondering what Pop wanted my father and Grandma Junia to see. She was so still. So empty. I thought of the statues I’d pretended to shake hands with at the Wax Museum on our class field trip to San Francisco. I thought of her in the blue flowered sundress on the rollaway bed in the dayroom. I wanted to rub her forehead like she always asked me to when she had her headaches. I wanted to listen to stories of her childhood and tell her how lovely the yellow kitchen looked in the morning. I wanted to ask why.
Grandma Junia leaned in over my shoulder, so close that a stiff strand of her fresh-frosted hair prickled my ear. “Presumably, she’s in a better place,” she said, and the words smelled of beauty shop ammonia.
The recorded sound of a church organ poured out of speakers mounted in each corner of the room. I was drowning in it. My knees began to give in to the undertow. Grandma Junia finally turned me away from the coffin with a hand around the back of my neck and guided me to one of the folding chairs. The metallic cold seeped through my slacks. The organ music stopped. Reverend Jameson started a prayer and we all bowed our heads and closed our eyes.
Wet sobs broke out around me but I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t keep my eyes shut. I couldn’t stay in that chair, that room. I heard the hi-fi scratch-scratch in my head and I wanted to holler out the truth. I rose to my feet but Grandma Junia tilted her head up and raised one penciled eyebrow. “Where do you think you’re going, young man?”
I turned and fast-walked up the aisle, between the folding chairs and bowed heads, and clattered out of the room as the reverend began to read from scripture. “Brothers and sisters: behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.”
I ran through the lobby and flung open the door. I ran across the parking lot, where Pop was sitting in the old pickup. He called out, but I didn’t answer and kept running and turned down a gravelly alley of dumpsters and back doors. I had no destination in mind other than escape. I ran two blocks north in the alley, then a half block west up to Main Street and another block north. I ran past Rexall Drugs, two dive bars and the old courthouse with the World War I cannons on the lawn.
I made a right turn down Third Street, deciding I would slip through our back fence again and hide out at home. But down the sidewalk I saw the sandwich board advertising the local music store, The Music Box.
I stopped, bent over at the waist, hands on knees, caught my breath.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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