We spent the night at Joe Brewer’s apartment so we could go shopping in Austin before driving back up to Paradise. Mother needed new clothes.
Bunny stayed in the van, sprawled across the backseat, while we went in the store. That pig could sleep anywhere.
I’d never spent time in a ladies’ dress shop, and from the look of it, neither had Joe Brewer. The two of us sat upright on a stiff little bench while Eleanor Rose helped my mother in the dressing room. Joe Brewer straightened his tie a couple of times, even though it looked just fine. A lady customer walked out in a slip and asked the sales clerk to get her a dress in another size. Joe Brewer liked to burst, throwing his eyes away so he wouldn’t be a party to seeing her walking around in her slip. But she was covered up just fine. I always wonder why you can’t walk around in slips or pajamas but you can sit out at the pool in string bikinis. Makes no sense to me.
“Voilà!” Eleanor Rose stepped from the dressing rooms into the area with mirrors, where we had been viewing the dresses and giving the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Clearly, Eleanor liked the next dress. She spread her arms like she was introducing royalty.
Around the corner glided my mother. Cinderella. I could practically see the bluebirds flying around her head with buttons and ribbons. The dress was lovely, not to my liking, very girly, but lovely on her. And she glowed all over, like that dress had gone deep in her soul and lit a candle.
Joe Brewer gave a thumbs-up, then lifted his other thumb too. Double thumbs-up. I did too, and Mother liked getting four thumbs up.
Then the sales lady said, “This model comes in a mother-daughter option.”
What the heck was a mother-daughter option? Well, believe it or not, some people make matching dresses for mothers and daughters to wear. The blood dropped out of my face. They’d tried to get me in a dress back in the department store but I had flat refused. Me and dresses are wrong, flat wrong.
End of story.
But Mother. There she stood as pretty as I had ever seen her, wanting with all her heart for us to wear matching dresses. They said I needed one dress for special occasions. They said I needed to look good in court, otherwise the judge would think I wasn’t being cared for.
“You need to look like a young lady,” said Joe Brewer.
“Come on, baby.” Mother reached one lovely hand out to me and I caved.
I let them take me back to the dressing room and put me in that girly dress, identical to the one that Mother wore, only it was much lovelier on Mother, with her long hair and her graceful arms. I let them pull that thing over my head, button up the back and fluff the skirt.
The sales lady said that the dress wouldn’t need any alterations.
I said, “Wordly Wizard.” Alteration was one of my vocabulary words. Nobody was listening to me.
They walked me back out to the viewing area and proudly showed me to Joe Brewer. I don’t know what his face showed because I kept my eyes trained on the carpet. I’d been through worse, I thought.
Then the sales lady hurried over and slapped a silly bow on top of my head. It clipped to what used to be my bangs, but were growing out crooked. Eleanor Rose smoothed my hair out of my face and said that she’d trim it up later.
Slowly I raised my eyes and looked at myself in the mirror. The mirrors, I should say, there were a bunch of mirrors that were so situated they reflected me over and over. I saw hundreds of Ruby Clydes going out into forever, looking absolutely ridiculous.
I turned around to my audience. Mother, Eleanor, Joe Brewer, and the sales clerk. “Fine,” I said. “But the boots stay.”
* * *
On the way back home to Paradise in the blue van, Mother sat up front, watching the rolling hills mound and rise as Eleanor drove toward Cypress Mill. Bunny sat up in my lap and looked out the window too. If he’d been a dog he would have barked at the Longhorns along the fences.
Suddenly Mother said, “I don’t deserve your kindness.”
“Don’t be silly, Barbara.”
Then lickety-split, Mother opened the glove compartment, snatched out a pair of scissors, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and cut it all off. Just like that.
Aunt Eleanor and I both yelped.
“I want to be like my sister,” Mother said. I thought, cruelly, that it would take a lot more than cutting off her hair to be like Aunt Eleanor. But that wasn’t fair.
“Barbara!” Eleanor shouted as she pulled off the road and slammed the blue van into park. She swiveled and burned holes in Mother with those eyes of hers. She knew how to use them.
“What?” Mother said. “You don’t like it?”
“Barbara, get a hold of yourself. You can’t count on me to take care of you and Ruby Clyde forever. I am very, very sick.”
Cancers could kill you, I knew that, and I had been with her in the hospital, but I kept putting her illness out of my mind. The thought of losing her was unbearable. Besides, I’d made a deal with God. He’d kept her alive for me.
“You can’t die,” Mother said. “It’s not right.”
“And you shouldn’t be on trial for armed robbery, Barbara. But you are. You’ll be home with us after the trial. So it falls to me to teach you how to take care of Ruby Clyde. I’m going to have to train you.”
Mother wasn’t insulted. She just sighed and said, “Whatever you say.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Eleanor warned.