Jacqueline Kelly - The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

For the great occasion, Mother made me a new white broderie-anglaise dress with many layers of stiff, scratchy petticoats. This was no corset but it definitely ranked as a form of torture. I complained at length and clawed savagely at my legs. I also had a brand-new pair of pale cream kid boots. They took forever to close with the hook, but, once on, they were fine-looking, and I secretly admired them.

Miss Brown taught me how to curtsy, holding my dress out sideways and dipping at the knees.

“No, no,” she said, “don’t grab your skirt like some clodhopper. Think of making wings, like an angel. Like this. Now sink. Slowly! Don’t plummet , child—you’re not a rock.” She made me practice many times before she was satisfied.

Then we had to deal with The Matter of My Hair. Mother had finally noticed that I seemed to have less hair than expected, but I explained that it had snarled so badly over the summer, what with the terrible sticker burrs, that I had been forced to chop out the rats’ nests and then cut a smidgen more to even everything up. Mother’s expression grew beady at this but she didn’t say anything to me. She called for Viola to help. Together they spent a good hour brushing and twisting and parleying as if I weren’t even in the room. I didn’t know you could spend so much time on hairstyles. Of course, I couldn’t protest too much because we all understood that this was my punishment for hacking away at it, and only fitting, too.

Then they slathered me with Peabody’s Finest Hair Food, Guaranteed to Produce Lustrous Locks, and set me out in the sun to bake for yet another hour with this revolting sulfur grease on my head. This , I thought, this is what ladies go through?

The one thing that made it bearable was that Granddaddy took pity on my wretched state and brought me one of his books, Fascinating Flora and Fauna of the Antipodes . The picture of the kangaroo showed a baby peeking out of its pouch. (Question for the Notebook: Why don’t people have pouches? Such a convenient way to keep a baby at hand. I tried to picture Mother with J.B. in a pouch. Answer: He’d never fit under her corset.) I yearned to see a kangaroo. And a platypus, a mammal that looked like a bizarre cross between, oh, say, an otter and a duck. Since I’d been lucky enough to see a hippopotamus in a touring circus in Austin, maybe my wishes weren’t so outlandish. I contemplated my chances and fanned a dim ember of hope in my heart as I sat in the sun, reeking like a giant match.

Finally, they put me in the hip bath and took turns pouring buckets of water over me. Then they scoured my head clean and tied up my hair in ringlets with cotton rags that stuck out all over like a frightful job of bandaging. I smelled like brimstone and looked like a casualty from the War. I was an apparition from H–ll.

Poor Jim Bowie burst into tears when he saw me, and I had to take him on my knee and convince him that I was not mortally wounded. Sul Ross called me Old Golliwog until I caught him and sat on him. Lamar snickered, and even Harry smiled. There was nothing I enjoyed more than being a source of amusement to my brothers.

I didn’t sleep well that night on my lumpy rags. I woke up sluggish and cranky the next morning. Mother decided it was pointless to finish my hair before we got to Lockhart, so I suffered the further indignity of having to wear an enormous ruffled cap over the rags all the way there in the wagon. My head was huge. I looked deformed; I looked like Lula Gates’s brother, poor old feeble-minded Toddy Gates, who had water on the brain. (Questions for the Notebook: Where did the water on Toddy’s brain come from? Did Mrs. Gates drink too much while carrying him?) I prayed that we wouldn’t meet anyone I knew and then felt guilty for drawing God’s attention away from serious matters to what was, after all, only an item of vanity. I admit I got more nervous the closer we got to Lockhart, but Harry kept telling me it would be a cakewalk.

We pulled up to the hall, and as the horses came to a stop, I leaped from the wagon and ran around to the back door before I could draw a crowd. Mother and Viola followed behind with a basket filled with hairpins and ribbons and tongs. They parked me on a stool and set to work on me, yanking the rags from my head. There were several other girls being tortured in the same way, so it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Mrs. Ogletree even primped her boy Georgie, whom she’d gadded up in a green velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. He churned with excitement on his stool, his blond sausage curls bouncing on his cambric collar.

Lula trembled and clutched a tin bucket to her chest and looked like she was going to be sick at any moment. The identical twins, Hazel and Hanna Dauncey, were an interesting and identical shade of grayish green. The sight of all this obvious distress in the others perked me up.

Miss Brown swept in wearing a new and unbecoming chartreuse gown and clapped her hands for attention. “Children! Mothers! Attention, s’il vous plaît .”

Instantly, there was complete silence. There was not a peep, a squeak, a rustle, not even from the squirmy Georgie. I realized that Miss Brown had the same threatening hold over all her other pupils as she had over me. Why , I thought, I bet she smacks all of us. Probably not Harry, but everybody else. So it’s not just me. Well, how about that .

“In ten minutes you will line up,” Miss Brown said, “from youngest to oldest, and then you will file into the auditorium behind me in an orderly—an orderly —fashion. You will then sit in the row of chairs along the back of the stage until it is your turn to play. There will be no talking. There will be no fidgeting. And there will especially be no pushing. Do I make myself clear?” Mute nods all around.

“Do not forget to bow or curtsy after your selection. Mothers, ten minutes.” And she turned and swept out, kicking her train behind her in one practiced motion. Viola and Mother both fell on me again with a vengeance, beating and thrashing my hair with brushes and tongs. Finally they stepped back to admire their work.

“There,” said Mother, “don’t you look a picture? I wouldn’t have recognized you. Look.” She handed me a mirror.

I wouldn’t have recognized me, either, what with the elaborate structural pile teetering on my head. Above my forehead rose a steep cliff of hair, which then swooped into an intricate pointy arrangement at the crown, all massed above triple pontoons of hair along each temple; bringing up the rear was a trailing cascade of fat curls down my back. This magnificence was topped off with the world’s largest pink satin bow. Mother and Viola looked well pleased. They didn’t bother to ask me what I thought, so I didn’t have to say that I thought I looked . . . appalling.

“See how pretty you look?” said Mother.

My hand drifted up to my hair.

“Don’t you touch that,” said Viola. “Don’t you dare.” She gathered up their tools while Mother struck up a conversation with Mrs. Gates.

I sidled over to Lula and whispered, “Hey, Lula, are you all right?”

She looked at me with her enormous hazel eyes and nodded but didn’t—couldn’t—speak. I noticed with envy that she had escaped drastic coiffuric ministrations; her pale, silvery-blond hair hung down her back in two neat braids. I tried to jolly her out of her panic. I nudged her and whispered, “Lula, look at what they did to my hair. It’s the worst, isn’t it?” Lula’s lips were clamped together. She responded with a long, quivering breath through her nose. I had the feeling she didn’t remember how to speak English.

“Lula,” I said, “you’ll be all right. You’ve played that piece a million times. Take some more deep breaths. And if that doesn’t work, well, you’ve always got your bucket.”