Coquetting Tarradiddles

A Mardi Gras Memory (a short story)

While I was busy packing up all of our electronics and various devices like precious cargo before we moved from Texas to Louisiana a few years ago, I nearly dropped my kid’s iPad when I heard my wife scream from the attic.

Well, it wasn’t so much a scream as it was just shouting my name as loud as she could to get my attention, which has the same chilling effect on my delicate husband psyche as any other kind of yelling. Usually, it’s because of something I did that I didn’t know I did until a sudden, sharp shout alerted me to the fact that I had, in fact, done whatever it was that prompted the shouting. It’s a vicious circle.

However, this time it wasn’t anything I’d done wrong. Kind of. More or less. Let me explain.

She was only yelling because she opened an olden wooden “treasure chest” (that was really just a fancy jewelry box) my mom had given me when I was a kid. I used it to hold onto knickknacks and keepsakes that were important to me when I was younger. It’s got a lot of ticket stubs, a couple of two-dollar bills my grandfather used to give me for luck, and a lot of rocks and pencil shavings, for some reason.

It’s also kept an envelope full of cash and a tiny plastic baby safe since 1993.

It was the envelope that prompted my wife’s shouting, probably more because of the cash than the little naked baby. There is, of course, a story behind this.

I grew up in Southeast Texas during the fabulous ‘80s, if that’s what anyone except me calls the decade. I know about the roaring ‘20s and the groovy ‘70s, but I’m not sure the ‘80s ever got a cool nickname, not that it matters. Those ten years were indeed fabulous (at least if you were a kid), and that’s all there is to it. But back to the story…

This being the ‘80s, I didn’t really know much about Mardi Gras. I had some cousins in Lake Charles that got time off from school for it, so I’d at least heard of it, but that’s as far as it went. (The good people of Southeast Texas would eventually climb aboard the hype train and start having Mardi Gras parades and events of their very own, but this was way before they got religion.)

I was normally a pretty good kid, being more afraid of getting caught breaking the rules than anything else, so I never had much experience with disciplinary actions in school until I hit eighth grade at the tail end of the decade. It was 1988 and I don’t remember what I did, but whatever it was got me “lunch detention” which meant I had to sit alone at a little table in the front of the cafeteria while all the other kids walked by and laughed. After I was done eating, I had to pick up trash and start sweeping the floor with a giant broom while everyone else went outside.

I was sentenced to two weeks of what was essentially the middle school version of putting me in the stocks so villagers could throw rotten tomatoes at my face in the town square, but at least I made a friend.

Her name was Miss Betty, the sweet little old lady who ran the cafeteria. Her approximate age was impossible to guess, but she had silver hair that was always frizzy whenever she wasn’t wearing her official cafeteria lady hair net, and her hands were wrinkled and spotty and shook whenever she handed back your change.

We didn’t talk much the first week of my detention, but she always flashed me a knowing kind of sympathetic smile whenever I went through the line that almost seemed to apologize for my predicament. After I’d finished eating on my first day, she took me through the kitchen to a little utility closet by the back door that held the giant broom. After that, it was mostly just me sweeping the cafeteria floor by myself while a few slow eaters finished up their juice boxes.

The first day of my second week was different. Miss Betty was more excited than usual, with more smiles and kind glances than normal, which is saying something. I never saw her angry or upset about anything. She was just that type of person.

I overheard her talking to the other cafeteria workers about Fat Tuesday coming up (which wasn’t a school holiday in Texas like it is Louisiana), but I just assumed she was making a joke about food. She worked in a cafeteria, after all. Made sense.

The next day, after I’d been sweeping for a while and the slow eaters had finally gone outside to run around during what wasn’t technically recess since we were supposed to have outgrown that by middle school (but it totally was), she popped her head out from the kitchen, smiled, and waved me over.

All the cafeteria workers were gathered around a prep table in the back, each one holding a plate and eating a slice of the most garish, ugliest little cake I’d ever seen. It looked like some kind of weird, knotted lump of a thing sprinkled with green, gold, and purple sugar with icing drizzling down the side. Miss Betty walked over and handed me a plate.

I’d never had king cake before and new food scared me, but something about Miss Betty’s smile told me I wouldn’t regret it. So I tried a bite. And then another. And another.

The cake was delicious. The garish icing and sugar were sweeter than I’d expected and the cinnamon of the cake itself was detectable but not overpowering. It definitely wasn’t the typical white cake I was used to eating at birthday parties.

On one of my last bites, I bit down on something hard: the baby. The look on my face when it happened must’ve tipped the ladies off because everyone started laughing and Miss Betty walked over to me with a grin on her weathered face.

I don’t remember what she said or even, all these years later, what her voice sounded like, but she explained a bit about Mardi Gras and the cake, and that getting the baby meant I got to be king for a day – and had to make the cake next year.

Which I did.

I spent most of my eighth-grade year in one type of trouble or another. Puberty has that effect on boys. This also meant that I spent most of the year in lunch detention, getting to know Miss Betty and the other ladies a little better, who could all see that I wasn’t a bad kid and didn’t treat me like one.

I went off to high school the next year, but when Mardi Gras rolled around, I stuck to my promise and made a king cake. Technically, my mom made it after calling my dad’s grandmother for the recipe, and she also drove me back to my old campus after school on Fat Tuesday.

When I walked in, I remember the office staff stopping me since I didn’t belong there anymore, but a quick word from my mom to the principal got everything sorted and I carried the cake to the cafeteria, where I barely caught Miss Betty before she left for the day.

She saw me holding the cake, smiled, and ran over to give me a great big hug. She still smelled the same, somehow like green beans and pizza boat mixed with vanilla and peppermint. She flipped the lights back on in the kitchen, and I set the cake down on the table. While Miss Betty grabbed a knife from somewhere in the kitchen, I inspected the cake for a small mark my mom and I put on the cake so I could tell roughly where we’d added the baby just before putting it in the oven.

I cut us a couple of slices. We talked and ate and caught up until she bit down on something hard. I laughed and told her it was the same baby from last year, then she laughed and promised to bake next year’s cake for me.

Which she did.

The PA system crackled to life at the end of my last period on Fat Tuesday in 1991, calling me to the principal’s office. I packed up my things, stopped by my locker, then walked to the office to find Miss Betty waiting there, smiling and holding a piece of king cake. Spoilers: I got the baby. Again.

I was able to drive myself back to the middle school campus the next year, transporting a slice of king cake on a paper plate covered in plastic wrap in the passenger seat of my beat-up old pick-up truck. I walked inside, nodded to the office staff, and kept on making my way to the cafeteria where Miss Betty was waiting. Somehow, that same baby made it in her slice again this year. Weird, huh?

My senior year went by pretty quickly, as senior years tend to do, but I remember things slowing down around Mardi Gras, when Fat Tuesday came and went…without Miss Betty. She never showed up to deliver my slice of cake. I thought maybe she just forgot or didn’t have time, but she didn’t show up the next day, either. Or the next. By the time Friday rolled around, I drove to her campus after school.

When I walked inside, the secretary waved me into the office. The principal walked out a minute or two later, holding an envelope. He told me Miss Betty retired at the end of last year, and she’d asked him to deliver it to me when I showed up for my king cake. I thanked him, took the envelope, and left.

She’d written my name on the front in delicate, broken cursive. I didn’t open it.

I could feel the baby inside it, of course, along with what was probably a letter I just wasn’t ready to read yet. With all the life changes getting thrown at me as soon as I’d graduate a few months later, I didn’t want to accept that I’d probably never see Miss Betty again. Too much change. Too fast.

I don’t remember how old I was or what I was doing when I eventually got around to opening it, but I was right about the baby and the letter. I just hadn’t expected the cash.

The letter was brief and sweet and to this day, whenever I think about it, I can still catch the faint scent of green beans and peppermint. She’d enclosed $250, the grand total of all the meager Christmas bonuses the school district had given her since we’d become friends, plus fifty bucks of “bingo money” she ended up saving for my graduation present.

The one line she wrote that I’ll repeat here sums up everything there was to know about Miss Betty.

She wrote, “This isn’t much, but even big things start small. You have the baby now. Go be the king of your life.”

I never spent the money and I probably never will. It’s still in that old envelope along with the baby and her letter, which my wife put back in the treasure box after I told her the story.

I might pass the baby along to someone else one day, but not yet. It’s still too soon. Almost three decades ago and it’s still too soon.

Maybe next year.