Lincoln. Columbia blue. Special-ordered it.”
“My own car? For me?” Hazel began to tear up.
“Yep. That way you can be a rolling advertisement for Delphi Motors. I’ll put the trucks under the men, and you can help me put Lincolns under their wives.” He winked at her. “We can be a team.”
“A team,” she repeated. Yes, she thought, that was it! Exactly what she had wanted and didn’t know how to say until Floyd put it into words. He was so smart. Hazel wanted to be a team with him. The idea thrilled her as nothing had in years. Leave it to Floyd to find a way for her to catch up and travel by his side.
To her delight and Floyd’s amazement, Hazel took to driving like a duck to water. Two weeks with her new Lincoln and she was backing up the big car, passing on the left, even parallel parking. Her stops became feather light and her turns as smooth as butter. After all those hours riding around with the route men, she figured something must have rubbed off. Hazel didn’t mention that to Floyd. She let him assume that at long last there was something she took to natural. Others might be good cooks and good mothers or good salesmen, but driving a car was going to be Hazel’s special calling.
In no time she was confident enough to do the furniture shopping all by herself. She got behind the wheel and powered the mighty machine west on 84, taking the highway straight on into Greenwood. Once there she negotiated big-city traffic, insisted on her rightful turn at intersections, and competed for parking places with the most aggressive of men drivers. The Lincoln was making her into a new woman.
Floyd was nearly as excited about her success as she was. After the furniture started arriving and they began to get settled into the house, he lost no time setting the next phase of his team plan into motion. He told Hazel her team goal was to put at least ten miles a day on the Lincoln and to do it in public view. “You can be an inspiration to all the women in Delphi,” he told her. “Nowadays ever woman ought to have her own independent means of transportation. It’s the way the world is going.”
One evening he brought home a brochure and dramatically spread it out on the kitchen table. “Looka here,” he said.
What Hazel saw was the full-color picture of a very happy woman driving down the road in her Lincoln. “Try to look like her,” he said reverently. “She’s the sign of things to come.”
The beautiful woman wore a large off-the-face hat with a mile-long ribbon rippling out the window, a matching scarf, and white gloves just to the wrist. At first Hazel felt a little strange about the idea, hoping that Floyd wasn’t trying to trade her up into something that she wasn’t. Yet when she saw the look of respect with which he regarded the woman in the picture, she knew she had to do it. Taking the advertisement to Gooseberry’s Department Store, she suited herself up as close as she could come to the happy woman.
Hazel put shirts and shoes and bow ties on the boys, loaded them up, and in her new picture hat with a blue satin ribbon, silk chiffon scarf, and white gloves, backed away from their beautiful home and drove up and down Gallatin Street, from the bridge to the church and around the courthouse, looking happy, six times a day.
Chapter Nine
THE TROIS ARTS LEAGUE
Hazel stepped back from the hall mirror and tugged at her skirt, evening the hemline. The dress was the most beautiful thing she had ever bought, an ice-blue shirtwaist made of silk shantung, which the salesman swore set her eyes to dancing like the sunlight on lake water. She took a tissue from the hostess pocket and, leaning in close to the glass, carefully dabbed at the lipstick in the corner of her mouth. Next she fussed expertly with the collar, smoothing the tips down flat.
Well, the clothes and the makeup were certainly up to muster. Everything shaded, highlighted, smoothed down and lined up. However, what Hazel couldn’t see was the person between the lines. Touching her cheek gently, she longed for Floyd and wished he was there to tell her how beautiful she looked. A glimmer in his eye would do. But he wasn’t there, and she needed to do this on her own. Floyd was counting on her to be a team with him.
At his insistence, she had invited some of the neighbor ladies over for punch and to show them what she had done with the house. More than three months had passed since they had moved in, and not a single person had come calling. Floyd had told her, “Hazel, you can’t wait for success to come knocking. You have to find out where it lives and then go hunt it down with a stick.”
“Floyd, I don’t know what to say to women like that. What do they talk about?” Whatever it was, she was sure it wasn’t mules, heel flies, and ringworm.
The women reigning in the houses around her were formidable-looking creatures, skin untouched by the sun and white as alabaster, with rouged cheeks, severe as Delta sunsets, their shoulders pulled back and chests puffed out, dripping with brooches and breastpins and cameos like generals on inspection. They were proper in ways that were foreign to Hazel, having cultivated curious manners that pushed you away rather than pulled you closer. When met on the street they could use a smile like an extended arm as if to say, “OK, that’s near enough.”
Hazel stood there at the mirror waiting for the bourbon to kick in. To make it through more and more days, she had been relying on the Jim Beam in the pretty decanters that Floyd received from the Senator each Christmas and kept lined up on the counter. She knew she shouldn’t, but sometimes it was the only way to muster the hope she needed to keep on going.
She remembered her first drink. As a girl, wandering the outcroppings, she came upon one of the places where her father hid his shine under a rock ledge. When Hazel unscrewed the top and brought the bottle up to her nose, the smell cut her breath and made her eyes burn. Should she? The preacher said it was a sin. Her mother called it a curse. However, that didn’t stop her daddy from devoting a good portion of his life to it.
Hazel took a drink. The clear liquid breathed its fiery breath deep down into her and caused her to tear up and cough. She took another.
The sensation was like nothing she had expected, like two warm hands clasping her face. Her spirits soared higher than the chinquapin oaks before her, higher than the Appalachian foothills that surrounded her. She now understood why her father drank. He missed hope, too. When she couldn’t find hope in Floyd’s eyes, sometimes a sip or two of bourbon would hold her over the dry spells.
Hazel heard Johnny yelling from the backyard. “Momma! She’s here! She’s here!”
At last! The maid Floyd had promised for the day. A day was probably as long as she would last. Maids came and went with such regularity, Hazel barely got to know their names, because usually by the end of their first day on the job Floyd had found some reason to suspect them of stealing from him.
Hazel waited to hear the confirming slap of the back door and then called out, “Bring her on in here!” She quickly drained the bourbon from the tumbler she kept hidden behind the flour sack and popped a peppermint in her mouth.
A husky voice sang out, “Whoo-ee!” When Hazel turned, the first thing that caught her eye was a stretch of white fabric showcasing a prominent rear end. At that moment the colored woman it was attached to was gazing into the parlor, her hands planted on her well-rounded hips.
“Look at all them pretty colors,” the woman said, apparently to the boys who stood on either flank. “More tints than One Wing Hannah’s jukebox.”
Davie
