The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God. Timothy Schaffert
children, and these girls, their dirty hair stinking with smoke, would walk up in their ratty tube tops and request that Tuesday paint little hearts and daggers, or their boyfriends’ names in gothic letters, on their chests and skinny upper arms. They’d sit giggling as Tuesday worked her brush begrudgingly across their baby-pink skin, the girls tipsy off whatever soft booze—the melon liqueur or wine cooler—they drank from a lunch-box thermos, using a Twizzler for a straw.
When I get Nina back, Tuesday thought, picking up a Tootsie Pop from the ground, unwrapping it, and tapping it against her teeth, I’ll let her have the run of the place. She would let Nina drink Pepsi for breakfast, let her sleep naked in the sandbox. “Why would I go anywhere with you?” Nina would tell Hud as she painted her toenails any color, even a garish hooker-red.
I hate him, she thought. Walking quickly toward the town square, where the flea market would already be under way, she ducked the toilet paper hanging from some of the trees and twisting in the hot breeze like streamers. Even when she loved Hud madly, she would fantasize about his death. Maybe not fantasize, but she would imagine what it would be like. He put her through a lot, people would say, marveling at her stoicism, but she was so devoted. They’d all call her the Young Widow Smith and would feel a thump of sympathy when they’d catch sight of her in the months after, wearing sunglasses in the winter and polyester scarves over her hair, resembling Barbara Stanwyck on her way to an illicit encounter.
As Tuesday approached the courthouse lawn, chewing on the hard candy of the Tootsie pop, she saw that Hud’s small but regular audience had already gathered at the bandstand steps. One of the girls wore curlers and distractedly pulled at a piece of frayed thread at the edge of the American flag draped across a rail of the gazebo. “Where is he?” Tuesday asked, and the girl shrugged. This was the one who loved Hud the most—Tuesday had watched her once. She had rested her head on another girl’s shoulder as she listened to Hud sing. Later, she had come to Tuesday’s table and asked her to paint on her throat as many words as she could fit from the lyric, “I taste the tart wild plum on your lips,” which Tuesday knew from a song Hud had written about a summer afternoon they’d spent at a lake years before, back when they were a couple of love-struck babies.
“When he sings,” the girl had said as Tuesday painted, the stretched skin of her neck twitching as she spoke, causing the blue letters to smear, “his voice is so strong, I can feel it shiver my chest.” But that wasn’t enough for the girl. Tuesday could tell she was thinking deep by the way her tongue clicked a little, her whistle wet with more to say. “It’s so strong in my chest, he can change the beat in my heart, make it beat to the beat of the song.” Ridiculous, Tuesday thought. Hud’s singing voice was weak and full of cracks. It would break at a song’s most emotional moment, obscuring key words, sometimes obliterating all meaning.
“Have you seen Hud? Or Nina?” Tuesday asked Ozzie Yates, who sold peaches from the back of the pickup he backed up to the edge of the lawn. Tuesday and Ozzie were old friends, and Tuesday’s son, Gatling, had loved Ozzie’s daughter, Charlotte.
“No,” Ozzie said, winking, “I’ve not seen Hud. And I’m damn near close to tears about it.” Ozzie and Hud shared a notorious animosity for each other, a friendly hatred that bordered on the sexy. Ozzie, in his dirty, loose-fit Levis and Western shirt all unsnapped down the front of his hairy chest, had been the one she had imagined being alone with when she was still lying next to Hud every night, scheming ways to ruin everything.
Ozzie took a pale yellow, nearly white peach from a basket and held it to Tuesday’s cheek, touching the gentle fuzz to her skin. “How much for it?” she said. She took the fruit, running her thumb across its light bruises and its few patches of orange freckles.
“It’s on the house,” he said, and Tuesday smiled and walked away. Ozzie depressed her terribly sometimes, even when they just stood there negotiating the price of peaches. He’d once had a pretty wife who died of a swift illness, leaving him to raise Charlotte alone. Though Ozzie was not at all judgmental, she sensed something pleading in his wet eyes, like he wanted to scold her for so blindly letting her family fall apart.
Tuesday walked on down the rows of tables of castoff notions and novelties, still asking about Hud and Nina. She stopped at Lily Rollow’s table and dipped her fingers into the teacups full of jewelry. Lily and her sister ran an antique shop in the country; the sister, Mabel, gave better bargains. Lily was cranky—she was pregnant and freshly divorced and only twenty years old. She sat in a fragile-looking lawn chair with a broken weave, a handheld battery-operated fan blowing her bangs up. “Who are you supposed to be?” Lily asked.
Tuesday touched at her hair, remembering she was still in last night’s costume. “Catherine Deneuve in Mississippi Mermaid,” she said.
“You’re so funny,” Lily said with a chuckle.
People often said that to Tuesday. But Tuesday didn’t think of herself as funny at all, hadn’t told so much as a tired joke in years. “Yeah,” she told Lily. “I’m a regular Henny Youngman.”
If anything, she was completely unfunny. She used to be funny, but she hadn’t liked it. A woman wants to be thought mysterious and tragic. I cry my eyes out most nights, she wanted to object. I listen to Roberta Flack and get sauced on hard cider and conk out, useless, around midnight.
“It’s adjustable,” Lily pointed out as Tuesday watched the glass of a mood ring on her pinky cloud over from a peacock-feather blue. “Fifty cents.”
Tuesday wanted to buy the ring for Nina, but she only had a quarter in the pocket of her dress. As she dug for more change, her fingers ran across a few hexagonal happy pills the Widow Bosanko had pressed into the palm of her hand the other afternoon during Nina’s birthday party. She’d been carrying them around ever since. While a group of neighborhood brats had batted at a Raggedy Ann piñata, Hud had sauntered in holding a beer bottle at his side, with a girl’s rabbit-fur coat he’d ordered from a catalog. Nina had worn the coat outside all day, stumbling, nearly fainting from the heat, her fair hair dark with sweat. “Mother’s little helper,” the Widow had whispered, administering the pills to Tuesday in a handshake, the wooden cherries of her bracelet rattling.
Tuesday wanted to swallow the pills now, but she remembered how a psychiatrist had put Gatling on prescriptions once, mood drugs that made him dopey and sluggish and trembled his hands. But for a while it had been a relief having Gatling so docile and curled up on her sofa watching afternoon reruns of The Rockford Files and McMillan and Wife.
Lily accepted the quarter as payment for the ring, and Tuesday walked on to Hud’s building. The buzzer, she knew, didn’t buzz, so she picked up some crumbled pieces of brick on the sidewalk and tossed them up to tap against the upstairs windows. Where is my family? she thought, noticing her reflection in the window of the defunct shoe repair shop. She pulled the one remaining false eyelash from her lid, then ran her long press-on nails through her hair, combing out her beehive. When you’re all alone in the world, you only have yourself to worry about, she thought. But when you have people, their tragedies are your tragedies. Your potential for misery is doubled, tripled, quadrupled.
Then she looked past her reflection to the shoes that remained on a shelf. The shop owners had just up and closed one day, after committing their thirty-year-old autistic son to an institution. They retired to Oregon, leaving behind some repaired shoes still uncollected, others still unrepaired. Tuesday saw one of her own strappy sandals that she’d forgotten she owned. The thin black ankle strap that had broken loose was now perfectly reattached, and the shoe sat waiting to step off into an elegant evening, high-heeled and pristine, its toe scuffs polished away. It wasn’t the type of shoe she’d wear, so she hadn’t even missed it, didn’t even know where its match was. She’d bought the shoes a few years before, when she and Hud were trying to save their marriage. Every other weekend or so, they would dress up and drive to the casinos across the river from Omaha. While Hud played blackjack after dinner with loosened necktie, Tuesday, in her black cocktail dress, would sit alone at a table in the lounge sipping chocolate martinis and listening to a woman who impersonated Barbara Streisand, Tina Turner, and Karen Carpenter.