IT WAS CARD NIGHT IN THE BACKYARD IN THE GARAGE apartment where her father’s four sisters lived. Gloria’s mother never joined the maiden aunties for cards, but she sent Gloria over to wait on them. For five days a week, the four aunts cleaned for and waited on twenty rich families of Mountain Brook and Vestavia. They wore starched pearl gray uniforms and white aprons. But on Friday nights, they put on their tight, jewel-tone toreador pants and played bridge.
When each of them placed a jeweled clip in her hair, they became the Queen of Spades and the Queen of Clubs, the Queen of Diamonds and the Queen of Hearts. The older sisters were the black queens and the two younger ones were the red queens. Emerald, topaz, ruby, and rhinestone—the glass jewels twinkled in their hair.
“ ’Cept your daddy, we got no use for menfolks,” they said to Gloria, from time to time. Born right in the middle of the sisters, Gloria’s father was the Exceptional One—a successful man who had brought his sisters in from the country and installed them all in his garage apartment behind the new house. While they played cards, Gloria made popcorn and fudge for them. As they slapped the cards down on the flimsy table, the aunts cracked their gum, threw back their heads so you could see the arch of their teeth, and laughed their big laughs.
Gloria loved the oldest one and the youngest one most—the Queen of Spades, Alice, with her ample hips stuffed into the cerise pants, and the Queen of Hearts, Lily Bit, who had green eyes like Gloria, but something of the color of Lily Bit’s eyes was in her skin so she looked almost khaki in her skinny yellow, raw-silk pants.
Among them, Gloria felt as light and salty as a kernel of the popped corn she piled into big blue bowls. They wouldn’t let her be shy. But she didn’t tell them her new secret: I went to a beer joint. I, the silent sophomore, have a new friend, a senior. You can’t guess what I might do next.
Two weeks ago, I went with Christine to Mr. Parrish’s office. I’m teaching in the night school: H.O.P.E. I speak in a low, quiet tone, but the students pull up their desks close to mine. They listen to me. I teach them the facts of history, but I could teach poetry or music or almost anything you could name.
Gloria wouldn’t tell any of that, but she would show off: she tossed a handful of popcorn up over her head and caught some of it in her mouth. The aunts hollered and clapped and tossed popcorn up over their heads till it was snowing popcorn. Gloria wouldn’t let them clean it up; she got down on all fours and picked up every piece. Then she boiled up a pan of glossy fudge.
That night, under the influence of fudge, Gloria dreamed dreams of things no one could possibly see: a chart of the human skeleton came off the wall and danced and sang like Mr. Bones in a minstrel show. She had seen a skeleton poster in handsome Mr. Parrish’s office for H.O.P. E. at the college. Mr. Parrish had introduced her to the poster: “Meet Mr. Bones.”
In her dreams, a cloud whizzed by like a bus full of schoolchildren singing gospel music, their bright young faces framed by puffs of whipped-cream clouds, on their way to jail. The sun rose like a plate of fudge, scored crisscross, in a diamond pattern. Her four aunts, their colorful pants tight as tree bark, grew four stories tall, uprooted themselves, stalked the earth, and Gloria leapt high on her cello, which had turned into a pogo stick.