“Mr. Nix, it’s okay if you can’t find it,” I call upstairs.
He is gone long enough that I want to make sure he hasn’t fallen, but he returns holding a crumpled Corn Dolly wrapped in a green string of white lights. “With the Christmas stuff,” he announces, holding it high above his head, the cord from the lights falling like an unwanted tail. “Gloria liked to use it as an angel.”
I take a plate from the cupboard and make peanut butter sandwiches. “Tell us about the year she won?”
“Oh, yes.” He strokes the corn husk carefully and eases his bones into the chair next to mine. They pop audibly. He rubs a hip. “We were astonished she made the ballot. All Tyson Vilmer’s doing. Always been a magician. I need to go visit him soon and ask to buy a goat.”
Janie Lee flinches and I bite my lip. He continues, “Tyson and Gloria grew up together. Sort of like siblings. It was probably Tyson’s influence that made her so strong.”
“Is that why she won the Corn Dolly?” I ask.
“Oh, no. It was the flowers.”
“The flowers?”
“People were in a rage over Vietnam. Myself as well.” He taps the side of his head as if he’s wearing a helmet. “And I guess, they just needed happiness instead of war. Gloria wasn’t one of those hippie people, but she loved flowers better than anything. Planted them all over town. Mostly without permission. Said to me once, ‘Vic’—she always called me Vic instead of Victor—‘I can’t help myself. I need more color than this.’”
I often feel this way. I like Gloria more and more.
“How many flowers do you think she planted, Mr. Nix?” Janie Lee asks.
“I reckon she did every yard in the county.”
Marshall County isn’t huge. But the notion of Gloria Nix planting seeds in every yard is huge.
“She was such a pretty soul.” His eyes water with love and memories. He says to Janie Lee, “You are too, dear. What’s your name again?”
“Janie Lee,” she whispers.
“Mark my words, eyes like that, and you’ll be winning your own Corn Dolly one day.”
“Thank you, sir. My friend Billie here is on the ballot this year.”
“Well, that’s wonderful. I didn’t understand this dolly hubbub at first. I says to Gloria, ‘There’s nothing outright special about a corn husk made into a dolly.’ And she says to me, ‘Oh, Vic, it’s so much more than a doll. It’s about being seen.’ I must have turned my head halfway around like an owl when she said that. She’d always been something to see, dolly or not, if you asked me.”
Grandy’s Corn Dolly—Maybel is what she named her—sits beside my Grampy’s urn in the pie safe. If there were a fire, Grandy would grab Maybel on the first trip, Grampy on the second. That used to bother me, placing so much value on a thing. But after hearing Mr. Nix, I realize again that the Corn Dolly is not a thing . . . it’s a metaphor.
I have been seen in my town, but I’ve never been seen as Mr. Nix is suggesting. I am not sure I want to be.
The time is seven p.m. And according to the chart beside the Corn Dolly calendar, Mr. Nix is due to shower in thirty minutes.
“You kids are so kind to visit. Let me give you something for your trouble,” he says, patting his breast pocket.
I mount a full, but kind, protest. “We won’t hear of it. Your company is our payment.” This is a line Woods might use at the Liars Table; it is not a lie.
Victor Nix is robotically removing items from the pockets of his coat: Kleenex, money clip, a peppermint, which he offers to Janie Lee and which Janie Lee accepts. Pockets empty, he lifts the camel-colored coat into the air, the way my mom did to me when I was a little girl who wanted to trek into the snow. He coaxes me. “Try it on. Make an old man happy.”
“Sir, I can’t.”
Mr. Nix makes the coat dance. The soft under-skin of his biceps flaps. “Please.”
Forced into polite obedience, I try on the man’s coat.
Mr. Nix is part tailor, part pixie. He pets the fur collar into submission, makes it lie correctly around my neck. Satisfied, he tugs the lapels and says, “A coat like this might win someone’s affection, young man.” He nods in Janie Lee’s direction, and I wish I hadn’t been too tired to attend to myself this morning. Bombshell one day. Man the next.
“Yes, sir,” I say.
I leave Mr. Nix’s house with my soul in a twist. We don’t speak at all on the way to my house and then we speak at the same time.
Janie Lee, who has recovered herself, says, “He knows you’re a girl.”
And I say, “I think we can transplant all those daylilies to the school.”
22
Friday night lights shine high above the football stadium. Insects swarm in little visible clouds even as a cool wind whips through the air, driving up hot chocolate and coffee sales. Davey, Fifty, Mash, and I share a blanket, awaiting the halftime show, in which both Woods and Janie Lee will perform with the band, and I, along with Tawny Jacobs and Caroline Cheatham, will be recognized like homecoming candidates.
Seven minutes left on the clock.
Janie Lee helped me get ready. After Mr. Nix’s confusion, I was not surprised this afternoon when she showed up at my house with her overlarge makeup bag and hair accessories. My hair isn’t easy to work with. The left side is clipped short. The top is choppy, falling left to right in jutting sections that range from ear-length to chin-length. It’s snappy and smart if you’re not trying to be sophisticated. The plan is for me to take black dress pants and a blouse—hers, because she insisted—and change just before halftime. Spending an entire football game, on cold aluminum bleachers, with concession stand food, in dress clothes? No thank you. This way, I can be back in my jeans as soon as the ceremony is over.
Mash is painted up with school colors—orange and white—and has so much food in his lap that we’ll be seeing it a second time around. “Don’t eat all that, dude,” Fifty tells him.
“What?” Mash protests.
Fifty responds, “You’re as likely to throw that up as we are to walk Vilmer’s Beam.”
“Dude, let it go.”
“Do you like football?” I ask Davey while the other two duke shit out.
Mash speaks around the hot dog. “You played football at Waylan, yeah?”
Davey seems interested in something happening to the band. They’re assembling on the track, thirty feet below. I know better than to show him sympathy with Fifty around. He answers his cousin reluctantly, “Yes, and lacrosse.”
John Winters is on his way up the bleachers. Beneath the blanket, Davey squeezes my knee.
Halfway to us, John stops. “David.” He gives a quick wave.
“Can you see my makeup?” Davey asks me.
In truth, better than usual. Heavier eyeliner and a tiny bit of smoky gray shadow. That isn’t the response he wants. I uncoil fingers from my knee, and whisper the easiest truth, “He’s seen you in costumes before.”
“But not at football games,” Davey says.
Five minutes left on the clock before halftime. I need to go change, but . . . I need to be here more.