Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel (2 page)

While Daddy was in the war, Momma and I lived in a big white house with my Grandmother and Grandfather Pettibone. We lived on one side and they lived on the other. Grandpa was sure funny. He stayed up all night once and planted a Victory garden that had forty-seven whiskey bottles lined up in a row. He loved whiskey and could put his leg over his head and do cartwheels. Grandma met him when she was in college. She was in a receiving line and when Granddaddy stopped in front of her, she laughed in his face, so they got married and moved to Virginia. He was very rich, and Grandma brought all her sisters but one to Virginia and married them off to rich men. But then Grandpa got to drinking too much and his family disowned him, and they had to move back to Jackson. Boy, was Grandma furious having to leave her rich sisters.

Grandpa became a pest control exterminator and raised chickens on the side. He was crazy about poultry of any kind and he used to play checkers on the kitchen table with this old rooster he had. Grandma says they weren’t really playing checkers, but I think they were.

I had a good time living with Grandma and Grandpa, all except for the ducks and chickens in the backyard that used to peck my toes. They thought my toes were corn. Stupid things. I wasn’t too crazy about Grandma wringing those chickens’ necks either … one time one of them without a head chased me all over the backyard. It scared me so bad that I ran right through the screen door and ruined it.

Grandpa liked me a lot. He was always sneaking over to Momma’s side of the back porch and stealing me out of my baby bed and carrying me down to the Social Grill and sitting me up on the bar. Once he took me to see a friend of his that was in jail. It made Momma and Grandma mad. They said I was too young to be visiting jails.

When Daddy came home from the Army for good, he brought me a rabbit fur coat from Hollywood and some Chiclets chewing gum and twenty Hershey bars. By then he had been busted down to private again, but he had a Good Conduct Medal. Momma says he must have bought it.

We didn’t live with Grandma and Granddaddy too long, though. They didn’t like Daddy and thought he was a little worm. Anyway, that’s what Grandma called him. When Grandpa would get drunk, he would put chickens in Daddy’s room. He also sent Momma a telegram that said there was a big rat living on the other side of the house. Then one night he got his pest control equipment and shot rat poison through our door, so we had to move. Right after that Grandpa went off to the Social Grill to have a drink and never came back. Somebody said they saw him driving a cab in Tupelo, Mississippi, but we don’t know where he is. He left his chickens and everything. I sure do miss him. I have to go now. Felix is having kittens in the back of the refrigerator and Momma is having a fit.…

Guess what? I saw the kittens being born … I’m never going to have children. No wonder Momma was mad at me for weighing nine pounds.

I’ve told you a lot about my daddy, but the thing that makes him really special is that he is a motion picture operator and so is his daddy. I come from a show business family; even my mother once was a movie cashier. She was working in the theater because it was the Depression and because her daddy didn’t worry about her if he could see her sitting in her glass cage.

Daddy running the movies makes me special. Some people call it cocky, but Daddy admires that in a person and told me that I don’t have to say “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am.” He doesn’t want his daughter sounding like a servant. I never do say it either, unless I am trying to be real sincere … or Momma is around.

Right after the Army, Daddy worked at the Woodlawn Theater. I spent every Saturday and Sunday in the projection booth in the balcony where colored people used to sit before they got smart and opened up their own movie houses. After that, white people wouldn’t sit up there, which suited me fine because I had the whole balcony to myself. The theater had red seats and big green lights that looked like lilies going up the sides of the wall. I could hang over the rail and drop things on people I didn’t like.

Momma says sitting in that balcony, looking down on people, has given me a superiority complex. Maybe so, but Daddy didn’t want me downstairs where some child molester might sit down by me and then Daddy would have to kill him. However, I have my own instructions as far as that nonsense is concerned; if anybody gets funny with me, I am supposed to stand up and scream out loud, “This is a molester. Arrest him.” Daddy told me that if everybody did that, there would be very few molesters.

He also gave me other useful information to protect me in the real world. If anyone hits me, I’m not to hit them back.
I wait until their back is turned, then hit them in the head with a brick. I have a beautiful aristocratic nose and Daddy doesn’t want it hurt. He himself has been saved from many a severe beating by bigger men by threatening to stab them in their sleep. The only bad time I ever had sitting in that balcony was while I was watching the movie
Mighty Joe Young
with Terry Moore. I was under the seat during the part of the picture where poor Mighty Joe Young was being hurt—I couldn’t stand him being so unhappy. Some people see fit to stick their old gum under their seat. Daddy had to cut a lot of my hair off that night. I say that people should put their gum on the side of the popcorn box or else in a candy wrapper. Momma says I shouldn’t sit under any more seats.

The Woodlawn Theater showed a lot of cheap movies. As I have gotten older, I am surprised to find out that Patricia Medina is not the star I thought she was. However, I still say that Mr. Goodbars and Raisinets are your best buy. Zeros, Zagnuts and Butterfingers are good, but a Bit-O-Honey lasts longer. I got a JuJu stuck in my ear once, so I stay away from them. Momma blames my cavities on eating all that candy, but I can pop gum better than anybody.

The Woodlawn Theater ran weekly serials: Buster Crabbe, the Green Hornet and Jungle Jim. My favorite is Nyoka, the Jungle Girl, who I like even better than Jungle Jim. Who cares about Johnny Weissmuller without Boy and Jane? Some people have no business sense. Nyoka could swing through the jungle faster than Tarzan any day.

Daddy would show me next week’s serial at night when the theater closed. I was always the first to know that Nyoka hadn’t been killed. I swear I never told, not once.

Nyoka has a lot to do with how I look in person. Daddy spent a whole day making me a swing rope on a tree in the backyard, but unfortunately he made an error in dynamics, as he put it. I grabbed ahold of the rope and he ran me back as far as he could and let go and it swung me right into the tree and now my right front tooth is chipped. Daddy thinks it makes me look different. Momma thinks it is awful.

Momma has a theory that Daddy has tried to kill me on several
occasions. Once when I fell asleep in the living room, Daddy cracked my head carrying me into the bedroom. He also knocked me off the pier into the Pearl River when I was three and didn’t come after me for a long time because he felt that young children, like young animals, could swim if they were scared enough. But I wasn’t scared enough. You should have seen the trash I saw on the bottom of that river when I was waiting for him to come and get me … tin cans, an old Roi • Tan cigar box and an old Firestone tire. The Pearl River attracts a lower class of people if you ask me.

Then there was the time when he picked up a two-by-four on the side of the road and put it in the front seat by me and stuck it out the window. He told me to hold it, which I did, but when the wind hit the board, it turned around and hit me in the head and knocked me out. Another time, when a friend of Daddy’s bought a brand-new Buick, Daddy pressed the push-button window up on my neck. But that time I think it was just a matter of him not being familiar with the equipment.

The main thing Momma bases her theory on is once Daddy, who is very artistic, wanted to make a life mask of my face. He put plaster of paris on me but forgot the breathing holes. On top of that he also forgot to put Vaseline on my face. He had to crack the plaster off with a hammer. Momma didn’t speak to him for a week on that one. I myself was sorry that it didn’t turn out.

She also says he is going to ruin my nervous system because of the time he sneaked up on me when I was listening to
Inner Sanctum
on the radio. Just as the squeaking door opened, he grabbed me and yelled, “Got ya,” real loud, which caused me to faint. She also didn’t like him telling me Santa Claus had been killed in a bus accident and making me throw up.

The Pettibones have very delicate nervous systems. That’s true. Momma is nervous all the time. She’s worn a hole in the floor on the passenger’s side of Daddy’s car from putting on the brakes. Momma always looks like she is on the verge of a hissy fit, but that’s mainly because when she was eighteen, she stuck her head in a gas oven looking at some biscuits and blew her eyebrows off. So she paints them on like little half-moons. People
love to talk to her because she always looks interested, even if she isn’t.

If Daddy is dangerous to my health, Momma’s not much better. She nearly got us both killed in the street last winter. Momma had read the movie ad saying, “Every woman will want to see Joan Crawford as the woman who loves Johnny Guitar,” and I guess she did. I wanted to see
Francis, the Talking Mule
, so I wasn’t in a good mood anyway. When Momma takes me downtown, it is an all-day ordeal. She was crazy about mother-and-daughter dresses at the time and she made me wear some ratty dress I hated. Whenever we go downtown, she starts her window shopping. Look, look, look! It drives me crazy.

We always go to Morrison’s Cafeteria to eat. That’s OK because I can get three Jell-Os instead of vegetables. After the meal, Momma sits and smokes and drinks coffee. I have to watch her like a hawk. My job is getting up and pouring her more coffee. That goes on for hours. Then I have to pull her chair out and help her on with her coat. She is big on children having manners. This night I sat through eight cups of coffee and Joan Crawford, so to make me feel better she said I could pull the cord on the streetcar on the way home.

It wasn’t my fault that there was a country woman on the streetcar that was crazy and talking into a paper sack. I was busy looking at her and missed our stop. Momma was mad because it was so cold and we had to walk two blocks back. She had on a big silver fox fur coat and she had her alligator purse, with the alligator head on it.

It was so dark we had to walk in the middle of the street. We’d gone about a block when she saw a car coming a mile away. She got hysterical and started running and screaming for me to get out of the street and jump up on the curb. I just stood there and watched her have a fit. She ran over to the side of the road and jumped up on the curb, but there wasn’t even a curb on that side, just an embankment. She hit the side of it so hard that her high heels stuck in the mud and she bounced back out into the middle of the street. When she landed, her coat flew over her head and she skidded with her purse out in front of her.

By this time the car had come around the corner, and when
its lights hit the eyes on her alligator purse, the man in the car ran off the side of the road. I hadn’t moved because it was so interesting to see Momma having a running fit like that, and the man didn’t get out for a long time. All he saw was an alligator head on a fur body in the middle of the winter in Jackson, Mississippi.

Finally, I went over and told him that it was only a woman in a coat that had jumped on the side of a hill. We helped her up, and I got her high heels out of the mud. Boy, was she mad. She wasn’t hurt much, just skinned her knees and ruined her stockings and lost an earring.

Walking behind her the rest of the way home, I started to laugh and almost choked myself to death trying not to because I knew for sure she would kill me. I tried to pretend I was coughing. My face turned beet red and tears were streaming down my face. It’s funny how when your life is in danger, you can’t stop laughing, but when Momma turned around to beat me to death or worse, I was saved. She started to laugh. Then we both laughed so hard we had to sit down in the street and I ruined my mother-daughter dress.

But I’m in a lot of trouble with her now for a play I wrote. I thought it was real good. We put it on at school. It was called
The Devil-May-Care Girls
. Two beautiful career girls live in New York and wear evening gowns all the time. When the maid tells them Harry Truman is coming to dinner, they invite all their friends and hire a band and everything. It turns out that Mr. Truman is an insurance man with the same name. Ha-ha, boy, were they surprised!

I was the star, and my best friend, Jennifer May, was the other girl. Sara Jane Brady was the maid. I only cast her because she was so tall. She almost ruined the play by reading all of her lines right out of a notebook. Other than that, it went very well. We did it for the whole school. Momma is mad because I had the girls drink twenty-seven gin martinis.

I try hard to please her, but I think she is disappointed in me. Every time she gets mad at me she says I’m just like my daddy. I made her cry last Easter. She had bought me a pretty Easter outfit with a pink straw hat, white patent pumps and purse to
match, but I got a black eye the day before Easter when Bill Shasa called my daddy a drunk. I tried to hit him in the back of the head with a brick, but I missed. I hate a boy who will hit a girl, don’t you? We spoiled his Easter, too, though. Daddy gave me some Ex-Lax in a candy wrapper and Bill ate the whole thing.

Momma had her heart set on me playing the harp after someone once said I looked like a little angel. There wasn’t anybody in Jackson who could teach harp music, so she settled on tap dancing. The Neva Jean School of Tap and Ballet promised to have your child on their toes in thirty days. The school was on top of the Whatley Drugstore, where they make the best banana splits in the whole world. I was a petal in the recital called “Springtime in Greentime” with a special number by the Gainer Triplets, who played a three-leaf clover. Skooter Olgerson was cast as a weed, but his momma didn’t want him playing a weed and she yanked him out of the show. I didn’t do too good in the recital. I was not in step but once.