Dancing on the Edge of the Roof by Sheila Williams

Author:Sheila Williams [Williams, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307519214
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Paper Moon is a spot in the road, with fifteen hundred people or so in the town and surrounding area. It's on the way to the Glacier National Park and Idaho, so a lot of people pass through in the spring, summer, and fall months. The antiques and craft shops stay open from April through September to accommodate the tourists. On weekends, the population swells. It's a big deal here. Reverend Hare told me proudly that Paper Moon had a traffic jam once last year in July.

But Paper Moon is, basically, a one-horse town. And most days it's kinda dead. It's just that no one has gotten around to burying it yet.

Most women could strip naked at the corner of Arcadia Lake Road and High Street and never draw a crowd.

But I bet you I could.

In a way, I became a sort of tourist attraction for Paper Moon. There were people of Scot, English, and Irish descent. Some with ancestors from Sweden and Norway, Ireland and Bavaria. There are Kootenai, Salish, Crow, and Cheyenne. There were Lakota, like Jess and his family, and Blackfoot. But there weren't many black folk.

Let me rephrase that.

There weren't any black folk.

I swore that some people came into the diner not just to eat but to look. At me. I told Jess I was thinking about selling tickets. He thought I was crazy.

I could spot them right away. They weren't even cool about it. They walk through the door, look around slowly, trying not to call attention to themselves. I knew what was going through their minds: “I don't see her. Where is she?” Then they would spot me, whisper to one another, and come on in. The whole time I'm cooking, or taking the orders from Mignon or Rosetta, I'd catch glimpses of them, looking at me, watching everything I did. Sometimes, when Jess rang up the bill on the register, they'd forget to take their change because they were watching me.

I told Jess, “This is starting to really piss me off.”

“They just want to see we got diversity.” He grinned.

I rolled my eyes and put a drop of vanilla in the batter.

“Aw, you're just seeing things,” Jess told me, as he wiped up spilled milk and orange juice after a family of seven had departed. “You ain't that much of an oddity. We're sophisticated, you know. We get colored folks around here all the time. Mignon,” he called out, “didn't some black man pass through here with Lewis and Clark, back in 1804 or 1805? Somewhere back there?”

“Yeah, but he didn't stay, Jess,” Mignon yelled back with a grin. “Said he wanted more of a cosmopolitan atmosphere.”

I snickered at them, giving my pancake batter a stir for the nine o'clock rush.

“You call me colored again and we're gonna fight, Mr. Running Fox Gardiner,” I told him, using his proper names. “I'm not just imagining things. Those people come in here just to stare at me.”

“She's angling for a raise, Uncle Jess,” Mignon commented.

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