If You Want to See Her Alive, Don't Leave Her Alone Here (1995)

There were certain people my Southern grandmother called "characters" and these were the people from my childhood who made lasting impressions on me. Characters are those people you come across in real life who are somehow larger-than-life. Characters are like people you've read about in books or seen in the movies, non-conformists in some way, creating themselves. All my life I've loved meeting anyone described to me in advance as "a character."

One of the characters who made a deep and lasting impression on me, although she was only in my life during the 1962 school year, was a teenage foster child Mimi and Grampa took in. Her name was Wanda and she had been removed from her parents' home because, although ostensibly operating a beauty shop, Wanda's mother and two older sisters had been accused of engaging in, from time to time, what is euphemistically referred to as "the world's oldest profession." Mimi's Southern accent caused me to believe, until I was about twelve and finally saw the word in print, that these women were called "horas," or, simply, "holes." My confusion was compounded when I learned to play a dance tune which was also called a "hora" on the piano. I pictured Wanda and her family unjustly prevented by The Law from holding lively dances at their house of beauty.

Wanda, who must only have been about thirteen, wore her hair in a high bouffant with one foot-long sausage curl hanging off the side. She accomplished this hairstyle with a can of hair spray, a rat-tail comb and hours of labor in front of the mirror "ratting" her hair. Mimi attempted to convince Wanda to adopt the less extreme and more girlish hairstyle of her classmates, but to no avail. Wanda applied forbidden make-up as soon as she was safely out of Mimi's house -- the Cleopatra eyeliner and sky blue Maybelline eye shadow so popular in the Texas Panhandle in those days. She adopted the radical fashion statement of wearing three pairs of bobby socks at the same time, rolling all three socks down together so that she achieved a kind of Minnie Mouse ankle doughnut roll. She wore an ankle bracelet on one leg. She had several homemade tattoos on her arms, jail house tattoos, I believe they're called, of boys' names or three-letter initials. I enjoyed sleeping over some Friday nights at my grandparents' house that year. Wanda ratted and styled my hair, applied make-up to my face and gave me tips about boys while we ate lemons with salt and watched a horror movie on television. Mimi and Grampa had turned in early.

Mimi bought Wanda a pair of utilitarian silver eyeglasses, which Wanda promptly flushed down the toilet after having been refused the black rhinestone-encrusted cat's eye glasses she preferred. Wanda cheerfully but firmly refused to do her homework. Wanda climbed out her bedroom window and disappeared into cars with tail fins like rockets. The school called sometimes to say that Wanda had disappeared from class. Wanda came home much later than expected. Wanda's tasteful cashmere sweater with pearl buttons disappeared, and a battered black leather jacket made for a man appeared in its place. Wanda was hauled to church to attend wholesome youth meetings, but she seemed to dislike the kids she met there and made no effort at all to fit in.

I went with Mimi one night to take Wanda home to her family for the Christmas holidays. I remember waiting for someone to come to the door of the beauty shop, delighted with the artificial Christmas tree in the front window, thickly flocked in white and bearing bulbs filled with colored water that bubbled up. Wanda's father, a balding, nondescript scrawny man, opened the door and we entered the shop. Wanda's mother and older sisters were sitting in a row in the pink upholstered chairs with drying hoods tilted back, waiting. Wanda's mother and sisters resembled each other strongly, all amazingly plump and fully inflated and pink and white, like women in a painting by Fragonard. Each had a high, stiff bouffant coiffure: the mother's black, one daughter's fiery red, one daughter's platinum blond. I thought all three of them very beautiful and envied Wanda as her sisters eagerly pulled her behind the flowered curtain that separated the beauty shop from the family's private living quarters. Wanda didn't even look back to tell Mimi goodbye as she was led away -- something good was cooking back there on a gas stove -- and then we were let out by Wanda's slightly bent-over father, who had never uttered a single word.

My father managed a large tenement-style apartment complex in those days, and it had many vacant units. Once, after school, Wanda took me to an empty second floor apartment. It must have been early spring, because bright white light beamed through the window-glass, projecting a four-across, sixteen-square pattern like a checkerboard on the floor. We waited for what seemed like hours in the unheated living room of the empty apartment until one of Wanda's boyfriends showed up. Then she and he went into the bedroom and left me all alone, sprawled out on the floor in my blue parka. I could hear their voices and Wanda's giggles for a time, and then they emerged. Wanda's boyfriend was trying to convince her that I could be held for ransom, and that my family would pay money to get me back. He began to plan the necessary details out loud. Wanda was silent.

Then, she looked at him and looked at me and flatly announced she was taking me home because she wanted a Coke. Her boyfriend didn't protest, and Wanda and I left, our footsteps echoing down the wooden staircase. At the bottom of the stairs I impulsively stuck my hand into one of the bank of tin mailboxes in the hall and pulled it out bleeding. The cut was small, but I remember the smell and taste of my own blood as I sucked my fingers and Wanda and I walked home without speaking.

Mimi's Christian patience with Wanda ran out late in the spring, exhausted, perhaps, by Wanda's endless class-cutting, a shoplifting incident and her uncompliant nature. At the end of the school year she was returned to her folks in the beauty shop. Later we heard she had been sent away to a home for girls who were troublesome. I drew a picture of her with the letters "JD" on her front; "JD" for "juvenile delinquent." I tried my hand sometimes at composing ransom notes for myself from letters and words ripped out of the newspaper or an old Sears catalog. Even later we heard Wanda had escaped from the home for girls (here I picture her in prison garb, running beside a one-lane asphalt road in the Everglades) and when she was located and returned to the home, she was pregnant. I pictured Wanda shamelessly and hugely pregnant in a blue prison work shirt, later giving birth to twin girls.

We never learned what ultimately became of Wanda. Something in me wants to believe that she eventually became a full-fledged "character." I sincerely think I saw a resistance and determination in her that was deeper, more fundamental than a caricature Bad Girl's rebellion. I just hope she didn't become a victim in a trailer house somewhere. Maybe she fell in love with a handsome mechanic and is probably a grandmother by now.

I'll always remember Wanda. Sometimes I still practice composing ransom notes for myself with words and letters I rip out of newspapers and magazines.