Autumn Street (13 page)

"It teach cleanliness," Tatie said darkly, wiping a counter top clear of nonexistent dirt, "and hard work if you wants to eat."

Ferdie Gossett belched again and sucked something away from an upper tooth, noisily.

"Excuse
you,
" I said primly, incongruously. It was what Mama said to Gordon when she patted his back after his bottle.

"Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Gossett," said Grandmother. "We will see you again next year. Come along, Elizabeth Jane."

He didn't look up. I noticed his long ragged fingernails as he snatched up the money, crumpling it into a pocket of his coat. His melancholy, lunatic eyes darted quickly around the kitchen as he stood up and shuffled toward the door. Tatie already held the mop in her hand.

"He didn't even say thank you," I pointed out to Grandmother as we returned to the library.

"He is a tasteless, impolite, and demented man," she replied.

"Then why do you give him money?"

"Because it is Christmas, and I am a Christian."

I sighed, knowing that her gifts to me would be undershirts, a prayer book, and a manicure set in a leather case. I had already opened them, sneaking under the untrimmed tree when everyone was in another part of the house, and rewrapped them carefully. I would have to say thank you, with feigned enthusiasm, to Grandmother on Christmas morning.

"Look, Grandmother! The star!"

While she and I had been in the kitchen dispensing Christian charity and vegetable soup to Ferdie Gossett, Mama had balanced on a chair to put the golden star in place at the top of the tree. For a moment, my resentment at the undershirts and prayer book faded; I stood in the center of the room, looking up, and saw the star reflect everything: the tall bookcases filled with
leather-bound volumes in orderly rows; the deep red and blue patterns of the Oriental rug; the brightly colored packages heaped on the floor; my sister, her blonde hair shining; and the plaid cocoon that held the pale fluttery moths of my grandfather's hands.

Click.

Click.

I sank again to the floor beside him, happy and safe, and made the same sound with my own tongue against my teeth. His head bobbed in a benedictory gesture. His teeth clicked. I smiled at him, rubbed my cheek against his fingers, and tried to echo the small noise: click, click. We looked at the star, the tree, the comforting room filled with Christmas; and we made the sound to each other, a tiny staccato duet, as if we were traveling together on tiptoe to places where neither of us had yet been.

***

Mama gave me paints for Christmas—paints and an easel—and although the sky outside was still a December sky, as gray as the undershirt exposed at Ferdie Gosset's grizzled throat and as forbidding as his murky eyes, I made my own skies once again. Grandmother said that I could not paint in my room. She wanted no splatters, she said, on the hand-hooked rug.

But Tatie made space in the laundry room and helped me stand my easel there. She gave me an old
shirt. It had been my grandfather's, but the once-firm lines of his shoulders were no longer outlined there. It fell in soft folds around me, and I put a deliberate daub of blue on the pocket with a flourish. Then I dipped the wide camel-hair brush in blue again and swept it across the paper to create a world of sunshine, summer, and space.

When I added yellow to my green, I found that I had made the color of the Pennsylvania countryside beyond our small town. Behind the meadows I painted the deep blue-green shadowy woods.

"Sweet heaven, that's just beautiful," said Tatie, and thumbtacked the painting to the laundry room wall.

Lillian Chestnut came into the laundry room with an armload of sheets.

"I'm not going to be in your way, Lillian," I said, forestalling her objections. "Tatie said that if I stay right in this corner I won't be in your way."

But she was looking at my painting with a smile.

"I used to live on a farm," she said. She put the sheets on the floor in a heap, leaned against the washing machine, and lit a cigarette.

"What was it like?"

"Pretty. All green like that picture." Then she laughed shortly. "Hard work, though. Eleven children in my family."

"
Eleven!
Tell me their names."

"Oh, lord, let me think. Alfred, he was the oldest, then Patsy, and Florence. Jakie. Ben. Then me. After me, Norman and Cal, they're twins. And then Jean, and Ruth, and the youngest is Shirley."

"Which one do you like best?"

"Jakie," she said, without hesitating.

"Why?"

Lillian shrugged. "He was just the nicest. He taught me to drive a car. He has yellow hair, like yours."

"Where is he now? Back on the farm, driving a tractor? Do you ever see him?"

"No, he's in the Navy someplace. Jakie and Ben and Norman and Cal, they're all in the Navy."

"At the war, like Daddy?"

"Yeah."

I sighed. "
Everybody's
at the war. Who takes care of your farm, now that everybody's at the war?"

"My father and my brother Alfred."

"Do you miss it? The farm?"

Lillian laughed. "No. Farms aren't any fun." She looked at the painting again. "Sometimes it was pretty, though. In the spring it was pretty."

"I bet you miss Jakie, though, because you liked him best."

"Yeah. I miss Jakie some."

She hissed water from the laundry sink over the end of her cigarette and threw it into the wastebasket. She leaned over to sort the sheets.

"Mama doesn't like any one of us best. I asked her who she liked best, and she said she loved us each the same amount."

"Yeah? Well, I guess mothers are like that. Or else they don't tell who they like best."

"Who do you like best, of me and Jess? You don't have to count Gordon, because you don't really know him."

"You."

I had known she would say it, or I wouldn't have dared to ask the question. Old Roasted Chestnut. For a moment I loved her.

"If you want," I told her shyly, "you can have the painting when it dries, and hang it in your room. You don't have to if you don't want to."

She closed the lid of the washing machine, added soap through the special opening, and turned it on. She looked at the painting for a long time; and then Lillian, too, became shy.

"Do you think maybe you could make a different one for me?" she asked. "With the sky and the field and all. But then out in the middle of the field, right there," she pointed, "could you maybe paint a tractor, and put a guy with yellow hair sitting on it?"

"Jakie?"

"Yeah. And make him sort of looking off there toward the woods? Like he had stopped the tractor to rest, and was just sitting there thinking?"

I could see Jakie in my mind. For the tractor I would have to find a picture in
Life
magazine or the
Saturday Evening Post
, to try to copy. It wouldn't be easy. But I could see Jakie in my mind.

"Sure. I'll do it after lunch, and it can be your Christmas present, because I didn't give you one."

"Thanks."

Lillian began to take the clean, dry socks from a wooden rack and to sort them into pairs. Mine and Jessica's: she matched them and rolled them neatly into bright-colored balls. I could hear Tatie putting plates around the dining room table, and knew that it was time for lunch.

"Lillian?"

"Yeah?"

"I hope he comes back safe from the war. Jakie, I mean."

She matched the toes of two red knee socks and smoothed them with her hand.

"Yeah," she said. "Well, maybe he will, maybe he won't.

She shrugged: that nonchalant, I-don't-care gesture that she made with her shoulders, often. I was puzzled.
She loved Jakie, I could tell; why, then, would she lift her shoulders that way, as if it didn't matter whether he came back safe?

Then, because I saw that Lillian's mouth was set stiffly, unlike her everyday face, I knew. I understood. It was a disguise, a mask not unlike the one I had worn at Halloween, when I had been taken outdoors after dark to an Autumn Street filled with what had seemed perilous horrors; and in covering my face I had hidden my fear.

It was all a kind of pretending. It explained why Great-aunt Philippa, whatever her private feelings were, could flutter her hand with its years-old diamond ring, could say that she thought of Grandmother as a sister, and could smile. It was why Mama said "Don't worry" off-handedly when we asked about Daddy, even if she had had no letters in a very long time. It was why Grandmother, often now, acted as if everything were still the same, as if Grandfather hadn't changed, as if the wheelchair meant nothing at all. It was why Tatie sometimes turned her broad back, offering no protection, no consolation, when I had been scolded and came to her, sobbing, for solace. And it was what had compelled me once, to my shame, to call Charles "nigger."

It was a kind of pretending composed of pride, of
the pain of powerlessness, of need—and fear of need—and it came from caring: from caring so much that you were fearful for your own self, and how alone you were, or might someday be.

M
Y THROAT HURT
. But I didn't tell Mama. I swallowed the coughs that started deep in my chest. Mama would have rubbed me with camphorated oil, covered my ribs with a cut square of flannel, and put me to bed. I would have missed playing with Charles, who was coming for the weekend.

Valentine's Day was past. But in my room, in my bureau drawer under my neatly rolled socks, I had saved the special Valentine I had made for Charles. It was red construction paper, stolen from school, and a
lace paper doily pasted neatly on the front. Inside, in my best printing, it said, "Be mine."

I wondered if there had been a Valentine mailbox at Charles' school, and if there were girls in his first grade who had asked him to be theirs.

If so, it didn't matter because I had something else to offer him. I had a new, unused sled, and there was fresh snow in the park across the street, where the smoothest hills in town could be found.

"Did you bring your boots, Charles?" I asked him, when I found him in the kitchen with Tatie late Saturday morning.

"Of course I brung my boots. You think I want to ruin these good school shoes?" Charles held up his feet, proud of a brand new pair of brown leather shoes with plaid laces.

"Those are nice."

"Yeah, they ain't so bad." He was shy, suddenly, and tucked his feet around the rung of the kitchen chair.

"Tatie, you know what I want? Hot lemonade with honey in it."

"You got a sore throat, Elizabeth?" asked Tatie suspiciously.

"No," I lied. My throat was like sandpaper. "I just thought maybe Charles would like some. Would you, Charles?"

"Yeah, that sound pretty good."

Tatie gave it to us, steaming, in thick mugs. We sat together at the kitchen table and sipped.

"Guess what, Charles. I got a new sled."

"Yeah? What kind?"

"Flexible Flyer."

"Little or big?"

"A big one. You want to go sledding with me?"

"Where?" Charles looked glumly into his mug, and then sideways at Tatie, who was at the stove, starting some soup.

"Across the street."

Charles sighed and kicked his chair with his new shoes. "I can't. I ain't allowed to go in front."

"That ain't in front. It's..."

Tatie looked at me sternly. "Don't say 'ain't,' Elizabeth."

I sighed. "It isn't in front. It isn't in the front yard, and it isn't on the sidewalk. It's way way across the street, through the park. He can go there, Tatie, can't he? Let him, Tatie. I've been saving my sled all this time so that Charles could go with me."

Tatie stirred her soup and turned the gas flame to low. She thought. Finally she said, "All right. Charles can go. But you go out the back door, and pull your sled up the side street over to the park. You got mittens, Charles?"

"Yeah. The red ones Mrs. Wiltsie give me for Christmas."

"You sure you don't have a sore throat, Elizabeth?"

"I'm sure," I lied again. I ran to the front hall closet to get my snowsuit and my boots.

"Mama," I called up the stairs. "I'm going sledding."

She came to the top of the landing. "Well," she said, laughing. "I was beginning to think you were never going to try out that new sled. It's cold out, though. You have Tatie help you with your snowsuit, and be sure to wear your warmest mittens, and..."

"I will, Mama," I said impatiently.

"And, Liz..."

"What?"

"Remember what I told you about the sled. You be careful."

"I will. I promise."

Outside, Charles and I pretended we were smoking Lucky Strikes, blowing our steamy breath into the gray, cold day. I flung myself into the fresh backyard snow and made an angel, dragging my arms into wings. Charles made an angel beside mine.

"Twin angels. When Grandfather's on the upstairs porch he can look down and see them," I told Charles.

"They not twins. Mine bigger than yours."

"Not much. Only a little." But Charles was right. During the winter he had become taller than I. "I'm
going to be seven next month. Then I'll catch up with you."

"Maybe."

We walked across the park, each of us holding part of the sled's rope, pulling it behind us. It ran smoothly across the snow with the thin quick sound of a knife-blade.

"Know what Mama told me about sleds?"

"What?"

"If you touch your tongue to the runner, it will freeze there. Your tongue will be stuck to the sled."

"Why you wanna put your tongue there?"

"I don't know. But some people do, and then their tongue is stuck there forever."

"Hoooie. How they get it off?"

"I don't know. I suppose they have to cut off your tongue."

"Or else leave it there, and then you got a sled on you for the rest of your life."

We both thought about that. It was terrifying.

"How would you eat, I wonder?"

"Spoon it in under the sled. Plunk your sled onto the table when it's eating time, and spoon the old food right in under."

I swallowed, thinking about it. The back of my tongue felt like a raw wound. I picked up a handful of snow and ate it, savoring the cold on my sore throat.