2.Cherry

The sun had just begun to pink up the sky when the whistle blew for the shift change two hours later. It was already ninety degrees outside, and in spite of the fans blowing fresh air into the onion room, you could barely breathe. My tear glands had long ago drained dry, swelled shut, and quit working, and I guess that was for the best.

We had gone through two or three of the big piles of onions that were mounded up around the room, and bushel baskets full of them, peeled clean and white, waited on flats for the guys to pick up on their forklifts and carry to the different parts of the plant.

That’s what I really wanted to do—drive a forklift. Those lucky guys got to whiz in and out of the warehouse on their cute little go-carts that had hard-rubber wheels and two steel forks sticking out in the front like the arms of the Sphinx. They pulled a lever and slipped the forks under wooden flats of pickles or onions, screeched around corners, and scared all the old ladies out of their hair nets with their hotdogging. But girls didn’t get to drive forklifts. Girls—especially summer-hand college girls—peeled onions.

—

Baby stood up and stretched. I reached out and picked off an onion skin that was stuck to the back of her leg. Even standing knee-deep in onion peelings, she was cute. I knew I shouldn’t, but I envied her. I am five-foot-eleven-and-a-half—well, all right, five-foot-twelve—and feel most of the time like Big Ethel, the giraffe down at the Little Rock zoo. I stretched, too, and uncurled my fingers from my paring knife. They practically creaked with pain.

“You look like a big ol’ lazy cat, Cherry, with that wild white hair and those yellow-green eyes of yours. You got eyes just like a lion.”

“Oh, get out of here, Baby.”

But I smiled. That’s one of the reasons I love Baby. She thinks I am as beautiful as she is. To her, my size-36-inseam skinny legs are gorgeous, even though I think they look like white ropes with knots for knees. The boys in the fifth grade used to call me Chicken Legs, and Baby, little thing that she was, would put her hands on her hips, get right up in their faces, and say, “She does not have chicken legs! They’re like a deer’s. She has Bambi legs.” Baby has always thought she was my protector.

We do look kind of strange together. Every once in a while, we’ll be walking down the street and pass a mirror or a store window, and it comes over me how bizarre we must look to people who haven’t watched us grow up together. We get a lot of Mutt-and-Jeff jokes, which we don’t think are the least bit funny.

—

“Durn that Alfred Lynn. This smell will never come off my hands. I’ll have to sleep with them under my pillow.” Baby pulled off her hair net and shook out her hair. It fell down like a black satin curtain. I took off my own net, undid the knot I had tied my hair into, and got a strong whiff of onion.

“Even my hair smells,” I said. “I hope that onion juice didn’t bleach it out any worse than it already is.”

As if that was possible. I was very nearly an albino when I was little. The only thing that saved me were my eyes, yellow-green instead of pink, but my hair was stone white, and I never had any eyelashes or eyebrows that you could see. My mother started dyeing them when I was six, before I started to school. She didn’t want the kids to make fun of me any more than they had to.

Mama and I would get it done at Dottie’s Kwik Kurl, in what used to be the old bank, on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was a little weird that the bank was now a beauty shop, but it was kind of elegant, with the marble floors and wooden counters and all. The shampoo bowls were in the front, where the bank customers used to stand in line. There, Miss Dottie would lay you back and scrub your head, digging in with her pointy red fingernails until your scalp tingled and nearly bled, and then she’d towel you off and take you around behind the teller cages, which still had bars on them, where she rolled you up and put you under one of the hair dryers. They looked like silver Martians’ moon helmets and blew out scalding-hot air that burned your ears to nubs and made you deaf from the noise. You had to sit there, no matter how much pain you were in, until the bell went off and Miss Dottie took you out.

Off in the corner, she had one of those old-fashioned permanent-wave machines—the kind where the hair is rolled onto wires that cook the curl into it. Since they’d invented cold waves, though, hardly anybody wanted the electric kind anymore, so it just sat there like some Dr. Frankenstein contraption. I guess it was expensive and Miss Dottie hated to haul it off to the junkyard.

Not that I needed a permanent wave. Besides being white, my hair was curly to the point of kinkiness. Miss Dottie used to roll it on the biggest brush rollers she had, to try to tame it down, but it was hopeless. It would be almost smooth for about a minute, then gradually I’d feel it start to draw up and spring back into its old shape.

Every week Mama went and got a shampoo and set, and every other week I would go with her for my eyelash dye job. While Mama was under the dryer, Miss Dottie would set me on a stack of towels, pump me up high with the foot pedal and, with the tiniest brush they made, she’d paint Dark Eyes dye on my lashes and brows. Sable brown. When she first started doing it, I was scared it would get in my eyes and make me go blind, but it didn’t, and after a few years I learned to do it myself. Not many people know I don’t really have sable-brown lashes and brows. My hair is still Pillsbury white, but I call it platinum blond. Unfortunately, people who haven’t known me all my life think it’s bleached, on account of the dark brows. You never can win.

—

We waded through the squishy old onion rinds, out into the sweet-smelling morning, and gulped in that clean air like we had just been pulled from the river. Lord, there’s nothing like watching the sun come up over the mountains. At first, the sky is all kind of dark hazy blue and cool. Then a blush of pink starts to warm it up—like the tail end of Picasso’s blue period, when he finally began to get out of his depression and paint clowns and things in pink instead of those scrawny blue beggar people. I like Picasso a lot. At least his earlier stuff—before he started making women look like monsters with their mouths open, screaming, and sharp, spiked tongues. Even if he offered, I wouldn’t let him paint my portrait for love nor money, but he’s eighty-eight years old now and still going strong, so that says a lot for him. Actually, there’s quite a few painters who have lived to be really old, if you think about it. Not the worst reason to go into it.

Baby and I are going to be taking our third year of oil painting at DuVail University in the fall. She likes Van Gogh the most. Maybe I do too. I can’t decide. Picasso has more styles to choose from. But Van Gogh’s color is wilder, and I love the way he made all those thick swirls of paint. You can tell from the way he piled on the paint that he was crazy—even then, paint couldn’t have been cheap. The fact that he lopped off his own ear is also a clue. I bet the girl he sent it to was never quite the same after she opened up that little package! Kind of sweet, though, that he loved her so much. I never met a boy who would lop off his ear for me.

But then, to complicate the issue of who I like best, there is Gauguin! And Rousseau. And Peter Max. Actually, I like them all. I haven’t really found my own style yet, but then it took Picasso a while before he found his.

Painting makes you look at things differently. You start thinking of everything in terms of paint colors—the cerulean blue of the sky, the sap green of the trees. The Payne’s gray of the rat.

—

“Do you think Alfred Lynn actually threw out that relish?” I asked Baby as I dug around in my purse for the car keys.

“I doubt it. He probably trucked it out one door and in the other. You can bet I’m eating my hot dogs with just mustard for a few years. Let’s go and get us some breakfast. Smelling onions always makes me hungry.”