Apron Strings (9 page)

“Yes, we had quite a trek,” Daddy said. He carried the picnic basket into the kitchen.

My mother kissed us like we had a disease, hardly touching our cheeks. “Now go on upstairs and clean up, then you can tell me all about it.”

As we climbed the stairs, Gordy poked me. “See, I told you.”

“What? Told me what?”

“That Helen would be taking a nap most of the day.”

I shrugged. “Guess you did. Too bad she couldn’t come with us.” I pulled a handful of pebbles I’d collected along the trail from my pocket. “Look at this. I think this is glass; rocks don’t come in this color blue.” Gordy pulled a handful from his pocket, and we sat down at the top of the stairs admiring our treasure.

“What ya doin’?” Helen asked.

“Where’d you come from?” I said. Gordy began stuffing rocks in his pockets so Helen wouldn’t see them.

“I was sleeping. Did you have fun?”

“Yeah, we did!” Gordy gushed. “The waterfall was so loud, and the water was cold, and there were rattlesnakes and cool rocks.”

“Rattlesnakes?” Helen looked stricken.

“Well, we didn’t see any, but they were there and if one bit Gordy he’d have been dead before Daddy could get him…” I trailed off when I saw the look of horror on Helen’s face. “No snakes,” I added lamely.

“They were there; we just didn’t see ‘em. But they saw us. You can bet on it,” Gordy insisted. I glowered at him, willing him to shut up.

“What did you do?” I asked Helen. Now it was Gordy’s turn to glower.

“She slept,” he mouthed over Helen’s head, “like I told you before. Shut up.”

“I went out to lunch and then shopping with Mama,” Helen said. “We went to Timberlake’s Drug Store. You know, where they make those really good milkshakes? I had a chocolate milkshake and a grilled cheese.”

“Wow, a whole one?” I asked. She nodded yes. “Then what?”

“You drank a whole milkshake?” Gordy asked, letting out a slow whistle.

“Yep. Then we went to that jewelry store with the creaky wood floors and the green rock with the lines in it. Mama bought some pretty gold earrings. She said if I was good she’d buy me something when we got to Tilmen’s. I asked her if I was really, really good, would she buy me two things? She said she would. So I was quiet as could be and didn’t whine or suck my thumb the whole time. Look!”

Helen pulled her trophy from behind her back: a beautiful Barbie with a dark ponytail dressed as a bride. “See?” she beamed. “A Barbie! And pop beads, too.” She held out her arm so we could admire her new pearl-like bracelet.

While I was happy that Helen hadn’t spent the day in bed, I was overwhelmed with jealousy and anger. A Barbie! I had only seen one on television. A real Barbie. I knew I had to have one.

“Can I see?” I asked. Helen held the doll up for me to admire, but didn’t give it to me. “Can I hold it?” I made a grab for the doll.

“Barbie says she wants to stay with me,” Helen said. She stepped back, holding the Barbie to her chest.

“What’s the big deal?” Gordy asked. “It’s just a dumb doll.” He removed the stones from his pockets and eyed my bottle blue stone with the same greedy look I’d fixed on Helen’s doll.

“I just want to see,” I whined. Helen extended her arms again, holding her doll up for visual inspection. “Hold her, I mean. Oh come on, Helen—just for a minute.”

“No!” she announced flatly. “Play with your own.” She marched down the stairs with Barbie securely in tow.

“I don’t have one,” I wailed.

My mother called up from the sitting room. “Sallee! Gordy! You two hurry and get cleaned up so you can come down and tell me about your day. I can’t wait to hear.”

Gordy and I stood up. “Guess you weren’t so right after all,” I sneered.

“So what?” he said, toying with the smooth blue stone. He casually lifted it in front of my face. “Do you want this?” he asked. He sounded as though he’d just as soon throw it away.

“No,” I snarled. “I don’t want any of them. You can have them all.”

Gordy took off down the hall before I had the chance to change my mind, leaving me alone to sulk. All thoughts of a wonderful day with Daddy were sullied by my single-minded desire to get my hands on that doll. I turned on the water in the shower. “Helen didn’t even know what a Barbie was,” I grumbled to myself. “She’s too young for one, anyway. Little brat.” I stepped out of my clothes and wriggled out of my bathing suit leaving them in a damp heap on the floor. I stepped into the shower. As the warm water ran over me, I made myself more and more miserable.

By the time I’d dressed and gone downstairs, I couldn’t think of one good thing that had happened that day. While Gordy spoke volumes about the fascinating things we’d encountered on our adventure, I sat glumly silent with my head in my hand, glaring in Helen’s direction.

“How about you, Sallee? Didn’t you have fun?” my mother asked.

“Yeah—I mean, yes. I guess it was fun.”

“What’s the matter, darling? Do you feel all right?”

“Tired, I guess.”

“Well, if you’re tired,” Daddy said, walking into the room, “then you slept too much. You had two really good naps today.” He picked me up and sat in the chair where I had been moping and plopped me down in his lap. I smiled despite my foul mood.

“And what’s this about you
guess
you had fun?” He wiggled my leg like he was testing to see if it worked. “I distinctly remember you swinging from vines, shrieking like Tarzan, or was that some other little girl?”

I snatched my leg away. “Stop it!” I whimpered.

He felt my forehead. “She doesn’t have a temperature,” he said.

My mother shrugged. “Helen, tell everybody what
we
did today,” she said.

“She already did,” I snarled.

“We went to the toy department at Tilmen’s and I got a dolly,” Helen said. She held the doll up for Daddy to see.

“Very nice, a bride,” he said.

My mother said, “I was so touched by this sweet little girl.”

My eyes rolled.
Please
, I thought.
Ol’ goody goody Helen
.

“Helen said to me, ‘Mama, I only want a doll if Sallee can have one, too.’ So I bought you one too, Sallee.”

“We got you the Barbie with blonde hair cuz I knew you’d like it better,” Helen added. “And we got
you
a big box of Lincoln Logs, Gordy!” She was beaming.

“Well, how about that little sugar plum sister of yours, Sallee?” Daddy asked. He leaned over and kissed Helen on the head, and then wrapped his other arm around her.

“Whattya got to say?” he asked as he jiggled my foot with his knee.

Chapter 6

O
n evenings when my parents entertained, we children had to go to each guest and say, “Hello,” and shake the person’s hand. Each time my mother would say, as if I were completely stupid, “Sallee, look at Mrs. So-and-so when you speak to her.” I wouldn’t, mostly because I thought Mrs. So-and-so would be able to see in my eyes how much I hated this little charade. So, I would look just over the person’s shoulder, just beyond their ear at something on the wall so that I looked like I was looking at them. Sometimes I would sneak a peek at some of the peoples’ eyes and I could tell they knew what I was up to, but my mother fell for it every time. She’d say, “That’s better.” As soon as everybody said how much we had grown since the last time they had seen us, we were whisked off to bed. Helen and I would sometimes watch Ethel leave from our bedroom window. She’d climb into that rusted Easter-egg-green pickup that her husband, Big Early, drove, and they’d disappear down the drive.

I asked her one day, “Why don’t you live with us?”

“Lord, honey! I gotta milk ol’ Janice an’ Mattie, an’ slop the hogs when I gets home. They can’t dos for theyselves.”

“Couldn’t Big Early do that? Couldn’t he milk the cows and stuff?”

“And who’d take care o’ him? Who’d cook ‘n clean and do for him?”

“Can’t he take care of hisself?” I asked.

“Chile, that man works hard as ten men! He need me to help ‘im.”

“But Ethel, I needs you, too. He’s big.” Ethel took me in her arms and leaned her head on the top of mine. She held me like that for the longest time. It would have been all right with me if she never let me go.

For a good while after I turned eight, Ethel had her grandson, Lil’ Early, living with her. On Saturdays, she would bring him to work with her. Only after I grew up did I realize that she didn’t bring him to play with us, but to work, because she had nowhere else to take him. Nevertheless, for us it was like a holiday when he came along with Ethel. On Saturday mornings I started sitting by the window hoping to see Lil’ Early skipping along next to Ethel as she came up the drive. Gordy and Lil’ Early were the same age, although Lil’ Early seemed years older to me. He had the best ideas for things to do: climbing trees and jumping out of them into leaf piles, digging to China in the sandbox, and having races around the house or the garden or up the driveway. Rarely did we find ourselves bored on Saturdays when Ethel brought Lil’ Early with her.

One particular fall day, leaves covered our entire front lawn. Lil’ Early said, “Git a rake and less rake up the leaves.” A rake couldn’t be found fast enough. Gordy, Helen, and I fell over each other trying to find one. None of us had ever had a rake in our hands, so naturally we waited for Lil’ Early to tell us what to do with it and how to do it. He took the rake and pulled it through the russet leaves, clearing winding paths. We were then instructed to find a wagon.

“Helen, go git the wagon,” Gordy barked. Lance raised his eyebrows to check that all was in order, and then lumbered over for a closer look.

The blue wagon Helen returned with had almost rusted through from disuse. That afternoon Lil’ Early turned it into an Indy car. He flipped the black handle back into the wagon and told us, “Git in the wagon.” He went around to the back and pushed us around making roaring car sounds. Holding on to the handle, Gordy sat in the wagon and steered down the green paths through the leaves.

We took turns pushing each other, making more and more elaborate paths. Each time we created a new course there’d be a chorus of, “It’s my turn!” The pushers supplied the sounds of roaring engines and squealing tires. Lance played the part of other racecars zipping around us, barking as we shrieked with joy. Whenever we crashed, ol’ Lance would bay in his deepest voice then bark at us as we said, “Come on, let’s do it again!”

“Would you push me, Lil’ Early, and make those motor noises for me? Make the crash sound—you’re better at it than I am,” I begged. The ensuing pileups left us sprawling, gasping, and laughing in the leaves. Helen, wise beyond her four years, played the starter. She waved an old checkered dishtowel purloined from the kitchen at the start and finish of each race and every pileup.

We played so late in the day that Stanley the yardman showed up while we were still romping around. He just laughed and sat down. He lit a cigarette and watched us play until an oldish rust colored car that was parked across the street suddenly roared to life. It looked like there were three men in it. As it screeched around the turn, one of them yelled what sounded like a threat. All I heard was “nigger.” As I looked up, I saw a man in the backseat shake his fist in our direction. Stanley didn’t seem to pay it much mind, but we did and were glad to hear Ethel call us. “You kids git inside now and let Stanley do his work,” she hollered from the front porch as she stood outside the big front door with her hands on her hips and her dishcloth tucked into her apron. We obeyed in a hurry, and Stanley set about raking over our paths and turning them into neat little piles for removal.

“Golly,” Gordy said as we hustled into the house.

“Yeah, that was really scary,” I said. All heads nodded in unison. “Should we tell Ethel?”

“I don’t think so,” Gordy whispered.

We didn’t tell her, but we talked about it for weeks afterward. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen that car before. All of us had been shaken to our shoes and none of us had any idea why.

Saturdays always flew by with Lil’ Early. It seemed like we’d just had breakfast when we’d all be called in for lunch. We all crowded into the powder room to wash up for lunch. Once while washing her hands in the sink with Lil’ Early, Helen took the soap he offered. She commented matter-of-factly to him, “You’ll never get those hands clean.” He looked at his hands, shrugged, and skipped off to the kitchen for lunch along with the rest of us.

“You dummy,” I whispered to her, “his hands aren’t dirty.”

She shrugged. “They looked dirty ta me,” she said, putting her thumb in her mouth and leaving the room.

Later the next spring, after Lil’ Early had been coming with Ethel almost every Saturday, I passed by the telephone in the back hall on my way outside to play in the yard. My mother was on the phone. It was easy to tell that she was upset about something. Her voice had that high pitch that it got when she was trying not to be mad, but it was pretty clear to me she was failing. I held back a little—tucking myself into the pantry—to see if I could hear who she was talking to. I only caught the name Alice before a maternal glare ushered me out the door, which I left slightly ajar. On the back porch, I strained to hear the conversation. It wasn’t often that my mother lost her temper with someone other than us, and it seemed to me that she was on the verge. The novelty of watching a full-blown show of temper that didn’t impact me directly was too enticing to walk away from. I perched myself on the back porch—situating my butt on the edge of the wrought iron chaise as quietly as I could manage while the springs groaned beneath me.

Stuart came home from a friend’s house just then and gave me a queer look. I put my finger to my lips, silently begging her not to give me away. She rolled her eyes, stepped over Lance’s sleeping form, and slipped in the back door. My mother’s voice ceased suddenly and didn’t start up again until Stuart’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs. I held my breath the whole time, waiting for Stuart to tell on me. Once I heard the creak of the top stair, a wave of relief and gratitude washed over me: it might just have been indifference, but sometimes Stuart could surprise you with little acts of mercy.