The School of Beauty and Charm Read Free

over when he wandered into the kitchen in his bathrobe, smiling sleepily at the box of cereal she had set at his place at the table. Throughout the day, she urged him to stop dilly-dallying and procrastinating. She picked out his secretary’s Christmas gift, tolerated his boss’s dumb jokes, and turned the news off at night when he fell asleep in his chair. She wore lipstick and a good bra for him every day of her married life.
    On the rare occasion that Florida went out of town, even for a day, our lives came to a halt. We’d sit around in silent, unlit rooms, with glazed eyes, as if we’d been unplugged from our current. Eventually, Henry would offer to open a can of tomato soup, but we were usually too apathetic to eat.
    Florida did not limit her activities to Earth. Although Jesus said, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions: if it werenot so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you,” Florida was a stickler for making reservations. At least once a day, twice on Sundays, she prayed for our salvation. On Saturday night, she pressed our clothes for church and set our shoes on a piece of newspaper by the back door for Henry to polish. In the morning, she curled my hair and made sure that I did not leave the house without a slip on under my dress. “We want to look nice for the Lord,” she said.
    In her spare time, Florida painted. She used acrylic paint because oil takes too long to dry and is hard to clean up. Once, Henry suggested that she wear rubber gloves while painting, to keep her hands unstained.
    â€œArtists don’t wear gloves,” she answered tartly.
    â€œWell I didn’t know,” he answered. He had never paid much attention to art, but he considered her renditions of
Starry Night, The Last Supper
, and
Femme au Miroir
, almost as good as the originals, and of course, much less expensive.
    Florida performed her jobs so well that no one really noticed them, but three times a week we followed her into the beige interior of Bellamy Baptist Church because Henry told us, with a doleful face, “It’s the least you can do for your mother.”
    Although much of the architecture in Counterpoint has enough historic significance to warrant a plaque, Bellamy Baptist Church was built to appear eternally new. It is beige, inside and outside: beige brick, beige trim, beige carpet, beige pew cushions. Since stained-glass windows don’t come in beige, we compromised with pastel, which shine weakly in contrast to the brilliantly colored windows of the Catholic church next door. Those windows pour their heathen colorsthrough our pale glass, and sometimes, in bright sun, red and purple light slashed across my hands as I ran them along the beige pew cushion.
    I longed to be a Catholic. I wanted to drink wine instead of Welch’s grape juice, wear a rosary, and have a huge cross hanging on our living-room wall, bearing a plaster Jesus who looked like he’d been in a motorcycle wreck, his blue eyes rolled up in agony, blood dripping down his flat, white belly. My best friend, Drew St. John, was a Catholic, and she had class. Until the tornadoes hit, and Jesus called me, I was privately planning to join the St. Johns in hell.
    Although I had broached the subject of my salvation with Florida and Henry several times, I had never received a satisfactory reply. “If I’m not born again, and I die suddenly, will I go to hell?” I asked. They babbled all sorts of evasive nonsense back at me, but the answer was plain from the worried frown on Florida’s face. Sometimes, when Henry wasn’t around, she’d hiss, “The devil’s got hold of you. Do you want to end up with him in hell?”
    To appease her, I’d say, “Oh, no. I want to go to heaven,” but I could only envision endless beige carpet.
    E VERY YEAR IN Counterpoint, the Daughters of the American Revolution sponsor a tour of homes. Each year they