Little Altars Everywhere Read Free Page A

head and look around, acting like she’s just as puzzled as everyone else. But later, once she gets us in the car, she’ll laugh her head off, saying, Did yall see how I shook up those old fuddyduddies?
    And that is only one of her tricks.
    Necie sits in the car hooting her head off, too, and finally Mama pulls herself up off the ground and goes over to Necie, walking like Red Skelton.
    She says, Good going, dahling. Done like a true Ya-Ya!
    Necie says, Vivi, when in the hell did they put aflagpole there? And they both crack up again and Mama lights them each a cigarette.
    I stand off to the side behind one of the big loblolly pines, hoping Mama can’t spot me, but she yells out: Sidda, dahling, go get me my file out of my purse. I think I’ve broken a fingernail.
    Great, I think, just great. This is going to be a perfect camp-out with my perfect mother, who I wish would shrivel up and blow away. Then I say a quick prayer so I won’t burn in hell for having such thoughts about my own mother. It can wear you to a nub, trying to be a popular person and a good Catholic all at the same time. There is no way in the world she can pull this off. It’s one thing for her to act half-normal in an hour meeting at the parish hall on Wednesday afternoons, but trying to act sane and sober for a whole weekend is a whole different ball of wax.
    So what do our great leaders do? They just walk away from that station wagon and that bent flagpole like nothing ever happened and lead us off on the big hike.
    Now, I just hate hikes because they always get me out of breath. Plus, I would rather simply look at the great outdoors than actually be in it. But I step along as quick as I can to keep up with M’lain and Sissy with their Ladybug shirts tucked into their pants. They’ve both got these neat walking sticks that they found, and their hair is done up in dog-ears, and everything about them is clip-clip.
    You’ve got to understand the social structure of Troop 55. There are
The Popular Girls. M’lain and Sissy, and maybe Mimi Plauché. And me, if I do things right on a lucky day.
The Almost-Popular Girls. They try real hard but never quite make it. For instance, their leader is Rena Litz, whose father is the manager of the very first K-Mart in Central Louisiana. She dresses in brand-new clothes all the time but they’re cheap-cheap-cheap, and she has an accent from Ohio that sounds like she always has a stuffed-up nose.
The Unpopular Girls. At least they love each other.
    and
4. Edythe Spevey.
    Edythe Spevey is in a class all by herself. She has kind of a crow face with pimples around her big old honker nose, and hair so oily that M’lain says you could wax the floor with her head. (Oily hair is the worst thing you can have at Our Lady of Divine Compassion parochial school. If you have oily hair, you might as well just lie down and die and get it over with.) And—just to top things off—old Edythewears cheap pointy eyeglasses and crinkled-up shoes. She looks like an orphan, even though we know she has this fat mother who takes in sewing. In fact, just last Christmas, Edythe’s mother made her this special holiday dress of green felt that was designed to look exactly like a Christmas tree. Edythe wore it to a Catholic Youth Organization party and the thing actually had little balls dangling off of it, and every time she bent over to pick up the ones that fell off, you could see her underwear. Now, a true Catholic would try to be kind to Edythe, but I just can’t. It’s too dangerous. You could get lumped in with her, and then maybe even become her, and end up living in a trailer the rest of your life watching Dialing for Dollars .
     
    Anyway, we’re hiking along like little marching rats, and Mama has on her white sunhat and sunglasses, and she’s holding the Super-8 like she’s shooting a movie in Hollywood. She adores that Super-8 and won’t let anyone touch it but her. She films all of us walking through the piney woods, and