Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel Read Free Page A

of coffee and Joan Crawford, so to make me feel better she said I could pull the cord on the streetcar on the way home.
    It wasn’t my fault that there was a country woman on the streetcar that was crazy and talking into a paper sack. I was busy looking at her and missed our stop. Momma was mad because it was so cold and we had to walk two blocks back. She had on a big silver fox fur coat and she had her alligator purse, with the alligator head on it.
    It was so dark we had to walk in the middle of the street. We’d gone about a block when she saw a car coming a mile away. She got hysterical and started running and screaming for me to get out of the street and jump up on the curb. I just stood there and watched her have a fit. She ran over to the side of the road and jumped up on the curb, but there wasn’t even a curb on that side, just an embankment. She hit the side of it so hard that her high heels stuck in the mud and she bounced back out into the middle of the street. When she landed, her coat flew over her head and she skidded with her purse out in front of her.
    By this time the car had come around the corner, and whenits lights hit the eyes on her alligator purse, the man in the car ran off the side of the road. I hadn’t moved because it was so interesting to see Momma having a running fit like that, and the man didn’t get out for a long time. All he saw was an alligator head on a fur body in the middle of the winter in Jackson, Mississippi.
    Finally, I went over and told him that it was only a woman in a coat that had jumped on the side of a hill. We helped her up, and I got her high heels out of the mud. Boy, was she mad. She wasn’t hurt much, just skinned her knees and ruined her stockings and lost an earring.
    Walking behind her the rest of the way home, I started to laugh and almost choked myself to death trying not to because I knew for sure she would kill me. I tried to pretend I was coughing. My face turned beet red and tears were streaming down my face. It’s funny how when your life is in danger, you can’t stop laughing, but when Momma turned around to beat me to death or worse, I was saved. She started to laugh. Then we both laughed so hard we had to sit down in the street and I ruined my mother-daughter dress.
    But I’m in a lot of trouble with her now for a play I wrote. I thought it was real good. We put it on at school. It was called
The Devil-May-Care Girls
. Two beautiful career girls live in New York and wear evening gowns all the time. When the maid tells them Harry Truman is coming to dinner, they invite all their friends and hire a band and everything. It turns out that Mr. Truman is an insurance man with the same name. Ha-ha, boy, were they surprised!
    I was the star, and my best friend, Jennifer May, was the other girl. Sara Jane Brady was the maid. I only cast her because she was so tall. She almost ruined the play by reading all of her lines right out of a notebook. Other than that, it went very well. We did it for the whole school. Momma is mad because I had the girls drink twenty-seven gin martinis.
    I try hard to please her, but I think she is disappointed in me. Every time she gets mad at me she says I’m just like my daddy. I made her cry last Easter. She had bought me a pretty Easter outfit with a pink straw hat, white patent pumps and purse tomatch, but I got a black eye the day before Easter when Bill Shasa called my daddy a drunk. I tried to hit him in the back of the head with a brick, but I missed. I hate a boy who will hit a girl, don’t you? We spoiled his Easter, too, though. Daddy gave me some Ex-Lax in a candy wrapper and Bill ate the whole thing.
    Momma had her heart set on me playing the harp after someone once said I looked like a little angel. There wasn’t anybody in Jackson who could teach harp music, so she settled on tap dancing. The Neva Jean School of Tap and Ballet promised to have your child on their toes in thirty days. The school was on top of the