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What I Really Think of You
M. E. Kerr
To my friend and agent,
Patricia Schartle Myrer—
with deep appreciation
Contents
One: Opal Ringer
Two: Jesse Pegler
Three: Opal Ringer
Four: Jesse Pegler
Five: Opal Ringer
Six: Jesse Pegler
Seven: Opal Ringer
Eight: Jesse Pegler
Nine: Opal Ringer
Ten: Jesse Pegler
Eleven: Opal Ringer
Twelve: Jesse Pegler
Thirteen: Opal Ringer
Fourteen: Jesse Pegler
Fifteen: Opal Ringer
A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
One
OPAL RINGER
IF I WAS TO SAY that finally Opal Ringer is going to tell you what she really thinks of you, would you laugh?
You always used to laugh. I never had to do much more than just show up and you’d all start nudging each other with grins starting to tip your mouths.
Now you come to see me, and I pretend I don’t particularly see you, but I see every one of your faces.
I know all your faces so well.
I see every face out there but one.
He doesn’t come. I think he wants to, but I know he won’t.
I start my story with the day I first saw Jesse Pegler. That was when my whole life first started changing.
You were all in my life for longer than I like to remember. You never changed me, just made me dig deeper under my strangeness, made me pull the crazy blanket over my head to look out at your real world through eye slits.
But Jesse Pegler brought me just a little closer to your world.
If any of you say to yourselves, “Did you ever think Opal Ringer would be famous for anything?” remember that I wouldn’t have, the way you always thought I wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for a certain Sunday at the end of May.
Woke up to hear my brother, Bobby John, arguing with Daddy over who’d get which bumper sticker.
Daddy already had three of them things plastered on the back of our van, one saying I KNOW THE WAY IF YOU ARE LOST, one saying HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS, one saying COME TO THE HAND FOR A HAND.
The Hand is Daddy’s church: The Helping Hand Tabernacle.
Daddy and Bobby John like bumper stickers the way Mum likes Good & Plenty candy and I like nice things. More about me and nice things later, but now is not the time.
I went downstairs in my robe and got a glass of milk out of the refrigerator.
They were all at the table in the kitchen, where these two new bumper stickers were sitting, still in their cellophane wrappers.
Mum said to Bobby John to take the green-and-white one because his car was green.
“The green-and-white one happens to be the one I want,” said my daddy. (The green-and-white one said FAMOUS LAST WORDS: DON’T BUG ME ABOUT JESUS.)
Mum said, “I don’t even know what it means.”
“What’d you buy it for if you don’t know what it means, Arnelle?”
“What it means,” said Bobby John, “is that some fellow is resisting Jesus. Some fellow is saying, ‘Hey, don’t bug me about Jesus!’ And he’s an inch from being saved.”
“Oh, I know that,” Mum said.
“You just got through saying you didn’t,” said Daddy.
“Royal,” Mum said to him, “take the blue-and-white one. Why won’t you just take the blue-and-white one?”
(The blue-and-white one said YOU REALLY DO ONLY GO AROUND IN LIFE ONCE, SO GO WITH JESUS.)
Daddy started talking about how Bobby John was spoiled clear rotten and thought he could get his way in anything. Daddy said a child should be beholden to his father, never mind that Bobby John was nineteen years old.
I gave the cat some of my milk in a saucer on the linoleum floor, and parked myself on the kitchen stool.
Then I started doing it again: Watching everything including me as though I had a spirit in me could leave my body and look down at myself.
Down at The Hand they’d make something out of it if I was to tell them, say I was having an out-of-body experience or some dumb thing.
I looked at the room.
I saw me on the stool first. I was sixteen, and had black hair falling past my shoulders and light-brown eyes. Had the pale face all Ringers have. Look like ghosts. I was famous for not smiling, and more famous for not talking a lot when there was more than one person around. Seems like there always was, so you wouldn’t have called me a mouth.
Daddy was the mouth. Well, he had to be, being a preacher. He was a big man but skinny, and his thick black eyebrows met at a point on his nose. He looked fierce, put the fear of God in you. Well, he was supposed to. But Mum said remember to smile, Royal, now you got a nice smile, and the little ones come to services have to see that smile or they’re going to cry. You point too much, Mum said, you point when you shout, and those little tykes don’t know they didn’t do nothing wrong. You scare them, Royal.
I’d never seen Daddy in anything but a white shirt and dark pants, tie sometimes, sometimes not, but he wouldn’t put a colored shirt on his back if the Devil was about to eat him.
One thing he liked was nice coat linings. He liked the satiny kind, red, silver, black, gold. When he opened his coat and waved his arms around, you’d see the lining and it was real nice.
Bobby John looked like Daddy, was what you’d call the spitting image. But he was not Daddy and never would be, and that was what made his life hard, I guess. He was supposed to be following in Daddy’s footsteps, but it was like an ant trying to put his legs down in elephant tracks.
Bobby John had the same coal-colored, bushy hair, and the same bright-blue eyes, and he was as tall, but give him a sermon to preach and folks found places
