Kerlak Enterprises - Reading Room

Paper Garden by Jerome Wilson

   Back in the days when life was easy and you could walk down the street at night and not worry about anybody knocking you over the head with some blunt object and taking all of your pocket change, Miss Mamie Jamison, the neighborhood kids' godmother who gave us money and candy and let us hide in her parlor when the big boys chased us from the playground, took seriously ill one summer and had to be put to bed. Her daughter, the one all the way from New York, moved in with her, often dressed in nothing but what looked like black body suits and tall fruit-basket hats like that Chiquita woman wears on banana peels. If it wasn't black body suits, she was wearing a pair of men's trousers and shirt along with a mighty fine pair of work boots. But despite her icky clothes, she looked like a movie star from the silent screens: deep, dark black hair, thin red lips, and that pale powdery skin color, like she was waiting for some invisible director to yell "action!" and give her the go-ahead to say her lines like that was the only thing God created her for.
   Of course, the only reason the Chiquita woman, Miss Marion, wasn't talked about like a dog too much by the other ladies in the neighborhood was because she was from New York. Meaning Miss Marion obviously knew what the latest fashions were and knew much more about fads and styles than these country women, including my own mama, would ever know in their whole life-time. This was also why she was called "Miss" Marion even by the old folks-the way she spoke, calling everybody darling and sweetie and always saying how much she loves somebody, even complete strangers she met walking down the street. You would have thought they were blood relatives.
   My mama was the main gofer over Miss Marion and would come home just about every other day with some catchy word or phrase that she had heard Miss Marion say, or what someone else had heard her say. Once, while leaving out the door to go to a Daughters of the Confederate Army meeting, Mama said to Papa and me, "I'll be back in about an hour. Chow." When she closed the door, Papa, with a puzzled look on his face, looked up from his evening paper and asked me, "What dog?"
   Something was happening to the town of Harper. All the women wanted to be Miss Marion, ordering just about every dress and hat and scarf and shoe that the Sears and Roebuck catalog had to offer. Even the men, down to the youngest and up to the oldest, watched Miss Marion out of the corner of their eyes. We watched how she switched her way through town knowing full well everybody was looking at her in a skirt that was at least ten inches too short and ten years ahead of Harper's time. Eddie T. sat on that old tree stump at the end of the main street playing his harmonica. Though he claimed that he was blind, he wrote and sang a song about her that teetered on the edge of vulgarity, sometimes drawing a good crowd and a nice pile of spending money in his ragged hat that he kept between his feet, if it was a Saturday.
   Even Papa, whenever he saw Miss Marion coming up on our side of the sidewalk, all of a sudden had to go check the oil in the car, or he had to go clip the hedges, or the grass was too tall and he had to go cut it. I think Mama knew what Papa was up to, but it was a summer and it was hot and the price of ground beef had dropped and life was just too wonderful so Mama didn't say anything. "At least he's away from that paper," she said. It was true: Papa had about three weeks worth of Harper's Sentinel's piled up on the coffee table. Most times now, he spent looking out the big picture window.
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