“That’s a Buick Roadmaster,” Grandpa said. “I expect an automobile like that might cost a man a thousand dollars.”
My mother was in that car.
She had a new gentleman friend, and he was in that car too.
The man went around to open the door for my mother. Her platform spike-heel shoes swung out first. She wore a Kelly-green suit that tapered at the waist then flared into a peplum. A matching green hat set forward on her head, the black veil fluffed a little. The red fox stole that draped around her shoulders snapped a toothless mouth onto its own bushy tail. Sparks of light flew from a jewel-studded watch pinned on her lapel. She looked like a movie star I once saw a picture of in LIFE magazine. Claudette Colbert maybe, although I’m not sure about the name. When she hugged me, I smelled the scent of gardenias.
The man’s hair was thinning, and he had some extra weight spread all over his body. His smile was big and crooked and had a dimple stopping it at each end.
Mother told me to say hello to Leo Reinbold.
“Hello, Goldilocks,” he said. “I put something for you in my suitcase. Let’s go find it.”
The something was a tiny gold locket shaped like a book. It had roses of pink gold on the cover. Inside was a picture of my mother and one of me.
Mother showed Leo the spare bedroom with the attached sunroom, the windows lined with Mother’s collection of salt and pepper shakers. There were more than a hundred sets. Women put ads in the backs of ladies magazines, trying to collect a set from every state. Mother would send little moonshine jugs to a woman in Idaho who needed salt and pepper shakers from West Virginia, and she’d get a set of grinning Idaho-potato shakers back. I never heard of a woman who didn’t hold up her end of the bargain.
Mother was looking for her favorites, miniature bottles filled with red wine some woman sent all the way from California.
But she was not about to find them in that sunroom.
I was sure of that because Vonnie and I had stolen them. We were planning to risk hellfire by drinking the swallow of forbidden wine and refilling them with grape pop before anyone was likely to notice. My sister lost her nerve but egged me on until I twisted a top off and tipped the bottle to my tongue. The taste was bitter, not at all the fizzy sweet I expected. I rubbed my tongue hard on my shirt sleeve, leaving a wide purple track that I knew would puzzle Grandma when she did the wash. When I screwed the cap back on, Vonnie and I couldn’t match up the torn seal, so we hid both bottles, hoping we’d think of some way to hide our thievery. We soon forgot all about it.
Mother looked puzzled as she scanned her collection.
“Looky what Grandma made,” I said, drawing her attention away from the missing shakers and onto Venus, now modestly covered with a pink-flowered apron. Mother reached to yank the scrap of cloth off, but Leo held a hand out to stop her.
“Let’s leave it,” he said. “I think pink suits her.”
And so we did.
Before supper, Grandpa asked Leo if he wanted to go with him to milk the cow.
“Sure,” Leo said, “I’ve never seen a cow in person before.”
Grandpa and Grandma laughed and called him a city boy, and Leo laughed too.
We went on long country drives in the big car that smelled like brand-new shoes. We found the best homemade raspberry ice cream. We walked up mountains with no trails. Where icy water poured down the rock face of a cliff, we cupped our hands and drank from the mountain.
After Leo and my mother went back to New York, the house turned quiet and empty. I didn’t remember it being so quiet before.
I overheard Grandpa say that Leo was a prince of a fellow, but he was a heathen. He didn’t even come from a Christian family, not that they weren’t likely fine folks.
Grandma agreed that did have to be taken into account. She didn’t expect he’d ever win a beauty prize, but she sure did like him.
Grandpa said Leo told him he was in the diamond trade.
Grandma said well that explained the fancy watch pinned on my mother’s suit. Why, Leo had to be twenty years older than her. And he was from New York City for goodness’ sake.
They both prayed Mother would come to her senses.
And she did.
Leo tried to convince her to marry him and she considered it, but in the end she couldn’t do it. “Some things thrive if you take them way off and transplant them,” she told him. “But not us.”
Our roots were in West Virginia.
And that’s where we would stay.
4
Strung on Fine Wire
The women sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the church pew in front of me were dressed as drab as church mice. Every dress or suit was black or navy or gray or . . . well, there wasn’t another or.
“Why don’t the church ladies wear pretty dresses and makeup and jewelry like my mother does?” I asked Grandma.
“Those things call attention,” Grandma explained. “As for the makeup and the jewelry, painted-on beauty and artificial adornment can’t hold a candle to the natural beauty God gave us.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
The church ladies didn’t seem so sure either. Some of them must have thought face powder didn’t count, so they dusted it on with little regard to matching the tint to their complexions. I sometimes saw the telltale fallout on navy crepe-covered shoulders in the pew in front of me.
The women didn’t wear shorts or pants or dresses cut below the collarbone or above the elbow or knee. Pentecostal women didn’t show much skin. A few brave souls satisfied their vanity by wearing
