The Penny (10 page)
T
he more time I spent with Miss Shaw, the more I wanted to find answers to the mystery of her. One day, when Jean and I stopped into Woolworth’s after we’d gone to the Fox to see Grace Kelly in
Dial M for Murder,
I recognized Miss Shaw sitting alone at the soda fountain, and I froze. She sat there so distinguished, a careful, aristocratic tilt to her jaw.
Every time other diners came up, they stepped past the seat beside her, giving Miss Shaw a wide berth. Every time someone hesitated as if recognizing her, that person would pass by without saying a word. Which led me to believe that I probably shouldn’t bother her, either.
Surely she was tired of me after seeing me so much at the shop. I was sure she was fed up with giving me instructions. When I tried to think of how to start up a conversation, I couldn’t imagine a single appropriate thing to talk about with her.
If you spend time sitting at the grave of someone you love, Miss Shaw, why doesn’t that grave have a marker
?
I stood in the aisle directly behind her, pretending to be fascinated by the boxes of cotton facial puffs, while she folded her plastic menu into thirds, handed it to the waitress, and ordered a tunafish-stuffed tomato. I perused Lustre-Creme shampoo bottles while the waitress brought her a Coca-Cola, which she sipped daintily through a straw. I read the backs of at least five tins of talcum while I watched the smooth fingers of her white gloves, and realized Miss Shaw had no intention of removing them even while she was eating.
The waitress set her plate down in front of her so hard that the lettuce almost flew off the plate. Jean appeared beside me. “Jenny, we got to get going.”
“Not yet,” I shushed, nodding in the direction of the soda fountain.
Jean followed my gaze. “Oh. It’s
her.
”
“Yeah.”
Jean sighed. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“How come you’re standing here spying on her?”
“I’m
not
,” I insisted.
“Then why are you whispering?”
“I’m not whispering,” I whispered.
Jean heaved a sigh of exasperation. “Five minutes,” she said. “Meet me at the front or else I’m going to leave you. I don’t have time to baby-sit you anymore.”
I grabbed an eyelash curler from the shelf and pointed it at my sister. Jean sure knew how to make me mad. “I don’t know why not. I always have to wait around for you, too. I had to wait all night for you the time you left out the window with Billy.”
She tossed her head, flinging her ponytail at me. “It’s not
my
fault you come snooping into my life all the time.”
Jean trudged off in a huff, and just when I turned to replace the curler in its bin, I saw Miss Shaw looking at me. My face burned with embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted Miss Shaw to catch me scouting her.
“Jenny Blake,” she said, coming over and touching my shoulder with her gloved hand. She’d left her uneaten lunch on the counter. “Are you interested in eyelash curlers? Who would have known? Do you want me to teach you how to use one?”
“Oh, I—” My words got tangled in my throat. Finally I said the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t know why you think you got to be so nice to me,” I blurted. “That’s the biggest mystery about you of all.”
She helped herself to the metal implement and demonstrated as if she hadn’t heard a thing I’d said. “You open it like this and slide it in as close to your eyelid as possible. Then you press. Like this.”
“I don’t know why you think you have to help me with all these things.”
“Every young lady needs to master the intricacies of an eyelash curler. Do you want to know one of my secrets?”
One of her
secrets.
Finally. I nodded dumbly.
“Move the curler out toward the tips of your eyelashes and press again. Just so.”
I stared at myself in fascination in the small display mirror when she released my lashes. My eyes seemed huge. I could see the copper light reflecting in my pupils.
“There you have it. The fashionable wide-eyed look.”
Well, surely that was one of the questions everybody asked about Miss Shaw.
How does she get that fashionable wide-eyed look
?
At least I knew the answer to
something
. In an instant I realized how much I wanted to trust this woman. Maybe Jean went bonkers over Grace Kelly because Grace was the sort of person every girl dreamed of being. But to me, Miss Shaw, in her mystifying graciousness, was the daily embodiment of the same thing.
“Thank you for teaching me how to do this,” I said, lifting my curled eyelashes toward her.
“Will I see you at the shop tomorrow?” she asked, as if she was almost afraid I wouldn’t come. Once again, I marveled that no one had seen fit to pause and chat with her. I thought of her picking at the tuna and the tomato while no one so much as gave her a smile or asked her about herself or said hello.
“Of course I’ll be there,” I promised, “but I’ve got to go now.” Jean was already heading toward the door.
I had to race to catch up with her.
The more pennies that kept turning up in my path, the heavier my pockets became. And the heavier my pockets became, the more I wanted to help people the same way that God was helping me. I would never let go of that very first penny I found. But I did give away a lot of the others. Everywhere I looked, I saw plenty of people who I sensed were sad, lonely, hurting, or in need of encouragement.
One day in the Ville, Pruett Jones (who rode the Harris school bus with Aurelia) took a ball to the forehead and I pressed a penny into his palm, telling him I hoped the ball didn’t make too big of a bruise.
When I saw Mrs. Shipley dust off her toddler after he’d taken a nasty fall, I wrote a secret note to her (“You have a nice way with your boy”), taped a penny to it, and stuck it inside her mailbox.
I gave away pennies to everybody because I wanted to help people the same way God kept helping me.
When I observed my last-year’s teacher, Mrs. Martha Dahlberg, sorting through fresh fruit at the greengrocer’s store on the corner, I placed a penny on the grocer’s scale so she would find it when she weighed her purchase.
I even swallowed my pride and gave a penny to Cindy Walker when she showed up on our landing, trying to earn a Girl Scout badge by asking if there was anything in our underprivileged neighborhood that she could help us with.
“You’ve got to have this,” I said expansively. “Go ahead and think I’m stupid if you want to, but I’m giving you this in hopes you’ll see all the good things that keep dropping into your life.”
When people like Cindy looked at me like I was nuts, I wondered if my small acts of kindness were having any effect at all. Several times, I thought about giving up, but I didn’t. Maybe I’d never see anything come of me passing along pennies. But reaching out to hurting people, even in a small way like this, helped me feel better about the hurts in my own life.
I was crossing Grand Avenue later that same week, headed toward the streetcar stop after work, when I heard someone call, “Jenny?” and I glanced back to see Miss Shaw’s blue convertible rolling along behind me. “Would you like a lift somewhere?” she called, her gloved fingers gripping her steering wheel. “I closed the shop early so I can visit the hairdresser. Don’t you live in the direction of Chouteau Street? I go right past there; I certainly wouldn’t mind driving you home.”
Instinct told me to decline even though the Cadillac dazzled me with its gleaming grille and its rockets protruding from the chrome on the front of the car. “I ride the streetcar every day,” I explained.
She pulled her scarf tighter and lifted an eyebrow as if she didn’t think that mattered one jot.
“I’ve never ridden in a convertible before.”
She patted the white leather seat beside her. “Well, it’s about time you tried it out, wouldn’t you say?”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“You really want to give me a ride?”
“Of course I do. Hop on in.”
I think I forgot to breathe as I climbed in beside Miss Shaw. I shut the door behind me and pressed my spine against the leather seat in amazement. The seat felt so low and broad, it made me feel like a giant held me in the palm of his hand. The minute Miss Shaw popped in the clutch and we sailed up the street, the wind caught my hair like we were flying. I cupped both hands overhead and tried to capture the air as it raced by. On the sidewalk, gazes followed us as we zoomed past. Miss Shaw switched on the radio. After a bit, when the tubes warmed up, we had music.
I gathered my hair in my fist, trying to keep it out of my eyes, to no avail. Miss Shaw tapped her fingers on the wheel in rhythm to the song.
“Did you know Grace Kelly showed off to her friends in a convertible?” I announced. “When she was a teenager, she stood on the front seat and steered with her feet.” I wasn’t trying to elicit information from Miss Shaw this time. I was just feeling chatty.
With her gloved fingers rapping against the wheel she said, “I suppose that means your sister would like to drive a convertible with her feet.”
“Probably. If she got the chance.”
I loved the way Miss Shaw arched her perfectly drawn eyebrows. “I have to tell you, Jenny—I wouldn’t give her the opportunity.”
Sitting back in my seat and feeling conspiratorial, I said, “Neither would I.”
Out of nowhere, Miss Shaw started talking about herself. I can’t tell you why; she just erupted into conversation, and I did, too. She asked if I’d fiddle with the radio and find KMOX because she wanted to listen to St. Louis jazz. I told her about Aurelia and Eddie Crockett, the horn man, and how he amazed me every time he played. She told me she liked to arrive ten minutes early at the salon to sort through hair magazines and make sure she wasn’t missing any new styles.
She said it had taken her six tries to get the convertible top up the first time it rained. She told me she loved a good chocolate soda. I confessed that I hadn’t meant to spy on her at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, but I hadn’t been able to help myself. In another burst of vigor, she told me how her old house was much too big to manage on her own and she’d hired a housekeeper to assist her. She told me how she ate at Woolworth’s often because when she ate at home, her maid served her meals alone.
I guess it was her talk about maids and a big old house and eating meals alone that finally helped me get my nerve up. Facing straight into the wind, I announced, “You know what folks all over town say about you? They say you store your shoes in separate velvet bags so they won’t scratch each other up, and they say that you sleep with cold cucumber slices on your eyes at night, and they say they’ve seen you in a cemetery sitting on the ground beside a grave without any stone. It’s crazy, isn’t it, all the things people say about you?”
I was too busy feeling free and important to check her reaction. I took her silence the way I wanted to take it, as absolute denial. Then I realized I’d been so busy listening to Miss Shaw, I hadn’t realized when we’d started passing street corners I recognized. We were coming perilously close to home. For these few precious miles, Miss Shaw had shared her freedom with me. But as her car zipped around corners and I began to recognize the flats slipping by, my glorious feeling of liberty began to vanish. My heart chilled. The easy banter died in my throat.
“You don’t have to drive me all the way to my flat. You can let me off and I’ll walk the rest of the way.” I didn’t want Miss Shaw to see the grubby, coal-stained building where I lived. I didn’t want anyone along Wyoming Street to see
her,
either.
“I don’t mind, Jenny,” she insisted.
All too soon we arrived at my neighborhood with its darkened bricks and its weedy yards, with its dented trash cans at the curbs and its sidewalks buckled from tree roots. Our brick flats hunk-ered together like sentries, shoulder-to-shoulder. I gripped the door handle in mortification. “You can let me out here.”
“I won’t let you drive the car with your feet,” Miss Shaw said, paying no attention to our surroundings. She didn’t seem to notice either my gloom or the wretchedness of my neighborhood. “But sit up a little higher, prop yourself on the armrest or something, and see how it feels. I want you to have a real ride in this thing before you go. I want you to know how fun this can be.”
When I did as she told me, the wind whipped my hair into my eyes. I thought,
This is it! This is it!
as Miss Shaw pressed down on the pedal and I had to gasp for breath. Front yards and tree trunks rushed past us.
This is what it feels like to escape,
I thought. But I wouldn’t be escaping. In a moment the car would slow and she would drop me off at the curb and I would have to return to my own life again. By the time she hung a U and I directed her to pull up beside the buckled sidewalk, I didn’t know whether to be grateful to her for giving me a taste of her freedom, or to be angry at her for making me want something I could never have.
“Is this where you live?”
I barely nodded as my hand slipped to the car door. “You’d better get out of here,” I told her, my voice grim.
“Is everything okay?”
I didn’t answer or look back.
“Jenny?”
I slammed the door resolutely behind me.
“I had fun,” she said.
But I ignored even that as I mounted the steps.
“Thanks for letting me drive you home!”
I didn’t wave or anything. As I heard the sound of her convertible driving away, the windows of our flat stared at me like knowing, accusing eyes. I couldn’t bear to think what Miss Shaw would say if she ever found out what went on behind them.
T
hen came the day when I walked into our flat and knew something had changed. Three weeks had gone by, and Daddy’s job had ended.
I could tell by the way Mama tiptoed through the hallway. I could tell by the way Jean started blaming me for things I didn’t do.
I’d messed with her blue eye shadow, Jean accused, and I’d ruined the brush. I’d snuck money out of her purse. I’d shoved aside hangers in her closet and now her skirts were wrinkled. Jean always came at me on the attack, with sergeant-square shoulders. She wanted to fight the world, it seemed, and I was always the first prey she encountered.
Mama never talked about what went on with Daddy, the fear he must’ve laid on her, the threats he made and carried out. Sometimes I’d walk into the kitchen in the morning and find her leaning over the sink, staring down the drain with her face grim, her eyes dry. When I tried to hug her, she’d pull away.
I’d tasted liberty only to have it stolen again.
How I dreaded Daddy’s return the evening of his last day on the job. Every step Daddy took toward our sweltering flat pushed me farther away from Eddie Crockett and the Six Blue Notes, and from Aunt Maureen’s constant need to feed me pork steak or Gooey Butter Cake (“Eat this, honey. It’s good for you!”), and from the routine contentment of seeing Aurelia. (“Where was King Solomon’s Temple?” she’d asked as we rode home, surrounded by trumpets and oboes and drums in the back of Chick Randle’s pickup. “On the side of his head.” “What kind of capsule do you take to make yourself feel way out?” she’d ask. “A space capsule!”)
Daddy’s walk went heavy in the heels. He’d thump through the house on our wooden floors, getting more reverberation out of them than Chick got from his bass drum. I heard Daddy heading up as I set the table for supper, his footfalls staggered. I could tell he carried something heavy up the steps.
When he swung the door open with his backside, we saw he’d bought us an air conditioner from Sears. He hefted it over his head like a world-champion wrestler would show off his trophy belt, and for one breathless moment, I thought he meant to throw it at us. Instead he said, “Look what we got.”
He was trying too hard, his words sharp and overzealous. I made up my mind not to let him impress us.
“Get this thing plugged in,” he ordered. “We’ll be more comfortable than anybody at the Ambassador Hotel. What do you say, Jean?”
There were occasional times like this when he tried to do something nice, but it was always short lived. Often we would freeze in our tracks, thinking we’d get slapped for doing something as simple as dripping water on the furniture, but Daddy would let it pass instead. Another day, one of us would spill water on the couch and get slammed into the wall. Never knowing what to expect next was one of the hardest parts of my life.
My sister stared at the appliance in terrified fascination.
“Let’s hook this thing up. What do you say?”
Daddy put the unit in the kitchen window. After he pulled out the pane, he went to find a piece of plywood to cut into shape. Mama sat down hard in a kitchen chair, staring at knobs marked
HI MEDIUM LOW
and at the spotless white vents that could be re-moved and rotated to send air rushing in different directions.
“Well,” Mama said, “aren’t
we
moving up in the world?”
When Daddy finished the installation, I tested the stream of air with my hand, not certain it would ever turn cool. When the air finally became as cold as winter water, Jean adjusted the vents and inclined her head so the breeze poured over her hair. She raked her fingers past her ears, pretending to pose like Grace Kelly for a
Life
magazine shampoo advertisement. I looked at her with her hair flying and, for the first time, I saw my sister as beautiful.
I don’t think she saw me at all.
Above the slight hum of the air conditioner that night, I heard the sound from Jean’s room that always awakened me, the omen that always terrified me, that always sent the expectation of evil running in chills along my spine. A faint cry . . . the murmured growl of Daddy’s voice.
The flat stayed silent as I lay listening in the dark, trying to convince myself that, maybe this time, I’d only imagined the sound. I wanted to push the idea away forever. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I’d been cast adrift, the same sensation as when the
Admiral
departed its dock before its rudder caught the current.
Every time I sank off to sleep, my mind awoke with perilous tales. I dreamed the soft click of a door latch. I dreamed the muffled heel-heavy footsteps in the hallway. I dreamed of someone looking for me, the footsteps stopping outside my door.
I waited a long time before Daddy came in.
My mattress bowed when he sat beside me. I closed my eyes, willing my body to stay still. Maybe he’d think I was sleeping and he’d leave me alone. Maybe he’d be too tired. Maybe, this time, Mama would come in and stop him.
That was how it always began. That was how Daddy ruined me, took me away from myself, one step at a time. In the darkness, I wasn’t dreaming as he placed his hand over my mouth and began to whisper. I wasn’t dreaming as he pulled back the covers and held me down.
In the morning I found my sister at the kitchen table with Mama’s pinking shears. She’d turned the air to HI and the blowing stream of it ruffled the pages of the magazine beneath her hands. It must have been about forty degrees in the kitchen, almost cold enough to snow.
Jean didn’t look up when I turned the air conditioner off. She’d been carrying an issue of
McCall’s
around since last week. She’d bought it at a newsstand because it touted pictures of Grace Kelly leading the United States delegation at the Cannes Film Festival.
Three times already, she’d showed me the pictures reprinted from
Paris Match—
a lavish photo spread from Grace’s meeting with His Serene Majesty Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand de Grimaldi, from the small principality of Monaco in the South of France. “A
prince,
Jenny. Do you think he wants to find a princess for his kingdom?”
Jean made me look over and over again at the shots of Prince Rainier escorting Grace around the palace, through the gardens and his small, exotic zoo.
This meeting almost did not take place,
the movie reel had blared at us the last time we went to the Fox.
The power went off in Grace’s rooms that morning and the prince arrived an hour late for their meeting.
“Do you think he might fall for her?” I’d asked.
“Anybody would,” Jean answered.
I wasn’t quite as impressed as Jean. I didn’t think Prince Rainier was as handsome as a prince should be. I didn’t like his craggy eyebrows, his thick-chested, short-legged stature, the cleft in his chin.
That morning I thought Jean intended to use Mama’s shears to finally cut out these pictures. She could tack them to her wall or put them in a frame and quit carrying the dilapidated magazine around with her. But when I sat beside her, I saw that wasn’t her intent at all. She powered the shears through thick piles of pages, working so hard that the scissor handles pressed ferocious red notches into her hands.
Jean was not selective. She slivered the Grace Kelly article, the interview with Bob Hope about his mother-in-law, the Chrysler convertible advertisement, the cigarette ad that read H
AVE
Y
OUR
C
OFFEE WITH A
K
ENT
. She shredded the Betsy McCall paper-doll pages and the article titled
“
The Hospital Gave Us the Wrong Baby
.
” Magazine strips drifted to the table like confetti.
“Jean!” I laid my hand over the shears so she’d stop. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t answer at first. Then, “There’s just all this stuff—things I’m trying to forget.” She stared down at the tatters of what she’d done. When she said that, I knew she wasn’t talking about the stories she’d been reading in magazines, but about her history with Daddy.
“What stuff?” I demanded. “Say it, Jean. What are you talking about?”
The air between us hung heavy with what was known, what couldn’t be spoken. Jean couldn’t be consoled. She couldn’t do anything except sit and cry.
Several times, when Daddy seemed preoccupied with tasks like cleaning his rifles or tinkering with the car, I attempted to sneak out of the house and go see the Crocketts. I gathered bottles to trade in, thinking the trip to the A&P would be an excuse to visit the Ville. But, “You know you get the same money for those at the confectionery,” he said. “Don’t let me find out you went farther than that.”
I fabricated an invitation to Marianne Thompson’s house in St. Louis Hills. But, “If she wants to see you, she can come here,” he said. “That’s what she gets for moving out to the boondocks. That’s what she gets, thinking she’s too good to live on Wyoming Street.”
Every plan I invented, he thwarted in the same taut voice. Then, “You see this?” He broke a rifle open over his knee and began polishing the gunstock with an oil-soaked rag. The smell of the linseed oil stung my nostrils, made tears burn my eyes.
“Maybe things happened I didn’t approve of while I was out working. I’m the only one making sure this family survives. Did that boy come around to see Jean? You’d tell me if he did, wouldn’t you? And what did
you
do with all your free time?”
I clamped my mouth shut. I was terrified he could read my mind at times like that.
“You know why I’m polishing up this gun, don’t you? It’s to keep people away from this place. People I don’t want to see. You tell Jean I said that, why don’t you? What’s his name? Billy? You tell your sister if that boy comes anywhere close to this house, he’s going to get shot.”
I nodded, but I was lying. I wouldn’t tell her. I did not want to ruin one of the few things in life that Jean looked forward to. Daddy could tell her himself. I wasn’t going to let him use me to hurt somebody I loved.
