The Best of Me(45)
Mrs. Peacock’s place was divided in half, her in the back, and someone named Leslie living in the front. A man named Leslie, who wore fatigues and stood by the mailbox play-wrestling with a Doberman pinscher as we drove up. I thought he would scowl at the sight of Mrs. Peacock, but instead he smiled and waved, and she waved in return. Five children wedged into the backseat, children just dying to report that they’d been abducted, but Leslie didn’t seem to notice us any more than Keith had.
When the car stopped, Mrs. Peacock turned around in the front seat and announced that she had some work that needed doing.
“Go ahead,” we told her. “We’ll wait here.”
“Like fun you will,” she said.
We started outdoors, picking up turds deposited by the Doberman, whose name turned out to be Rascal. The front yard was mined with them, but the back, which Mrs. Peacock tended, was surprisingly normal, better than normal, really. There was a small lawn and, along its border, a narrow bed of low-lying flowers—pansies, I think. There were more flowers on the patio outside her door, most of them in plastic pots and kept company by little ceramic creatures: a squirrel with its tail broken off, a smiling toad.
I’d thought of Mrs. Peacock as a person for whom the word “cute” did not register, and so it was startling to enter her half of the house and find it filled with dolls. There must have been a hundred of them, all squeezed into a single room. There were dolls sitting on the television, dolls standing with their feet glued to the top of the electric fan, and tons more crowded onto floor-to-ceiling shelves. Strange to me was that she hadn’t segregated them according to size or quality. Here was a fashion model in a stylish dress, dwarfed by a cheap bawling baby or a little girl who’d apparently come too close to the hot plate, her hair singed off, her face disfigured into a frown.
“First rule is that nobody touches nothing,” Mrs. Peacock said. “Not nobody and not for no reason.”
She obviously thought that her home was something special, a children’s paradise, a land of enchantment, but to me it was just overcrowded.
“And dark,” my sisters would later add. “And hot and smelly.”
Mrs. Peacock had a Dixie cup dispenser mounted to the wall above her dresser. She kept her bedroom slippers beside the bathroom door, and inside each one was a little troll doll, its hair blown back as if by a fierce wind. “See,” she told us. “It’s like they’s riding in boats!”
“Right,” we said. “That’s really something.”
She then pointed out a miniature kitchen set displayed on one of the lower shelves. “The refrigerator broke, so I made me another one out of a matchbox. Get up close, and y’all can look at it.”
“You made this?” we said, though of course it was obvious. The strike pad gave it away.
Mrs. Peacock was clearly trying to be a good hostess, but I wished she would stop. My opinion of her had already been formed, was written on paper, even, and factoring in her small kindnesses would only muddy the report. Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein’s monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn’t look at him the same way again. My sisters and I didn’t want to understand Mrs. Peacock. We just wanted to hate her, and so we were relieved when she reached into her closet and withdrew another backscratcher, the good one, apparently. It was no larger than the earlier model, but the hand was slimmer and more clearly defined, that of a lady rather than a monkey. The moment she had it, the hostess act melted away. Off came the man’s shirt she’d worn over her slip, and she took up her position on the bed, surrounded by the baby dolls she referred to as “doll babies.” Gretchen was given the first shift, and the rest of us were sent outside to pull weeds in the blistering sun.
“Thank God,” I said to Lisa. “I was worried for a minute there that we’d have to feel sorry for her.”
As children we suspected that Mrs. Peacock was crazy, a catchall term we used for anyone who did not recognize our charms. As adults, though, we narrow it down and wonder if she wasn’t clinically depressed. The drastic mood swings, the hours of sleep, a gloom so heavy she was unable to get dressed or wash herself—thus the slip, thus the hair that grew greasier and greasier as the week progressed and left a permanent stain on our parents’ gold bedspread.
“I wonder if she’d been institutionalized,” Lisa will say. “Maybe she had shock treatments, which is what they did back then, the poor thing.”
We’d like to have been that compassionate as children, but we already had our list, and it was unthinkable to disregard it on account of a lousy matchbox. Our parents returned from their vacation, and before they even stepped out of the car we were upon them, a mob, all of us talking at the same time. “She made us go to her shack and pick up turds.” “She sent us to bed one night without supper.” “She said the master bathroom was ugly, and that you were stupid to have air-conditioning.”
“All right,” our mother said. “Jesus, calm down.”
“She made us scratch her back until our arms almost fell off.” “She cooked sloppy joe every night, and when we ran out of buns she told us to eat it on crackers.”