Free Standing in the Rainbow by Fannie Flagg

pointing at her, saying, “Ha, ha, I thought you weren’t speaking to me. Go get it yourself,” and ran off the porch and down the street. A disgusted Anna Lee got up and went to the kitchen and opened the icebox and asked her mother, “What I don’t understand is why you had to have another child. Why didn’t you just stop with me?” Dorothy smiled. “Well, honey, we thought we had.” Anna Lee turned and looked at her mother in surprise; this was the first she had heard of this. “What happened?”
    “I guess the Good Lord just decided to send us another little angel down from heaven.”
    “I may be sick,” said Anna Lee and left the room.
    Mother Smith came in. “What’s the matter with her?”
    Dorothy laughed. “She wanted to know why we had to have Bobby.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I blamed it all on the Good Lord.”
    “Well, that’s as good an excuse as any. According to the Presbyterians, everything in life is preordained, or at least that’s what Norma’s mother says.”
    “Ida? How would she know, she’s a Methodist.”
    “Not anymore. As of last week she claims she’s a Presbyterian.”
    “What?”
    “Oh yes . . . right in the middle of the bridge tournament she announced it.”
    Dorothy, amazed, cracked three eggs in a tan bowl with a blue stripe and stirred. “But there’s not a Presbyterian church within a hundred miles around here. Why would she want to be a Presbyterian all of a sudden?”
    Mother Smith poured herself a glass of iced tea. “I suppose it’s all part of her plan to move up in the world.”
    Dorothy was baffled. “Well . . . I just don’t know what to say. . . . There’s a lemon in the icebox. I just hope she’ll be happy.”
    Mother Smith reached into the icebox. “I do, too, but I don’t think anything can make her really happy unless, of course, Norma marries a Rockafella and she can at last take her rightful place in society.”
    High Society
     
    W HAT M OTHER S MITH said was true. If there was such a thing as high society in Elmwood Springs, Norma’s mother aspired to be it. After all, Ida Jenkins’s husband, Herbert, was the town banker and as such Ida felt she had a certain position to uphold and it was her civic duty to set the standards of genteel behavior. To light the way. Set an example. She was in charge of all the refinements of life and in her relentless pursuit to bring culture and beauty to the community she nearly drove Norma and her father crazy.
    Even though she was living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, she subscribed to all the latest women’s magazines to keep abreast of the times. In the late thirties she took to spelling the word
modern
“moderne” and referring to their house as a “bungalow,” her clothes as “frocks.” She used the word “intriguing” as much as possible, had her hair styled just like Ina Claire, the Broadway star, and she never cried when she could weep or have “wept.”
    Too, Ida was a club woman from tip to top. She was the grande dame of the National Federated Women’s Club of Missouri and had spearheaded the local Garden Club, Bridge Club, the Wednesday Night Supper Club, the Book Club, and the Downtown Theatrical Club and was never seen on the street without a hat and white gloves. She never served a meal in her home without having an individual nut cup at each place setting and a clean white tablecloth. “Only heathens eat off a plain table,” she said.
    On Norma’s sixteenth birthday she had given her a copy of the new and enlarged edition of Emily Post’s book on etiquette, in which she had inscribed:
    If everyone would read this we would certainly be spared a lot of unpleasantness in this world.
    Happy Birthday
    Love,
    Mother
    Ida was even on a first-name basis with the author and often wondered out loud, “I wonder how Emily would handle this?” Or she would sometimes preface her remarks with, “Emily says . . .” Ida’s life goal and, she assumed, all of