How High the Moon (2 page)

I let everyone believe that I still remembered Ma well—how she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her skin smelled—but the truth of the matter was, I wasn’t sure I remembered her right anymore at all, because when I thought of her, her face looked suspiciously like Glinda’s, the good witch from
The Wizard of Oz
. And when I thought of her singing voice, it sounded an awful lot like Teresa Brewer’s. Even when I thought I was remembering her smell, I’m not sure if it was
her
smell I was remembering, or the perfume of Mrs. Fry’s peonies in summer.

It didn’t matter, though, I told myself. One day soon I was going to be watching a movie at the Starlight Theater and Ma was going to come on that screen and I’d take one look at her face and remember her as though I’d never forgotten her. And then I’d know that she’d be coming home to Teddy and me soon, because the way I saw it, chasing your dream was like winning a race at the last day of school picnic, and once you crossed the finish line the winner, there wasn’t nothing more to do but pick a prize out of the basket and head home.

And wouldn’t it be a happy day when Ma came back! For me,
and
for Teddy, who I knew missed not only
her
but his Oldsmobile, too.

Teddy didn’t have the money to buy another car after Ma drove away in his, and it was too far for him to walk to work come winter and would cost him too much to take Ralph’s taxi every day. So he had to quit his job with the Soo Line Railroad to take one closer to home. At the meatpacking plant over on the south side of town, Mill Town Meats, though most folks called it The Hanging Hoof. Every morning until I was eight and could get around by myself, Teddy got me out of bed, fixed me an egg, and walked me across the street to the Jacksons’ to get sat on—babysat by Mrs. Jackson, or sat on by Jack for real, if he was in a scrappy mood—then Teddy hiked to work. When his shift was done, he’d pick me up, fix me
some supper—usually eggs and fried potatoes, because after seeing all that blood at work, the last thing Teddy wanted was to see more of it sizzling in his fry pan—then he’d sit on the sofa and mourn the loss of the lady he loved more than electricity.

I was upset when Teddy had to stop working for the Soo Line after Ma left—upset because I thought he was the conductor, and whenever a train rattled through town while he was gone, I was sure it was Teddy blowing that whistle. Promising me that he was at work, and that he hadn’t run off to chase his dream of becoming an electric man. Jack Jackson set me straight on that one, though. Telling me right in front of his brothers and sisters—all six of them with
J
names and heads shaped like lightbulbs—that Teddy wasn’t nothing but a Soo Line shit shoveler. “It’s true!” Jack yelled when I called him a liar. “Teddy doesn’t do nothing but scrape the shit out of the cattle cars once they’re delivered to The Hanging Hoof.”

I never did tell Teddy that I knew he was a shit shoveler and not a conductor, which was probably for the best, him always wanting to look so respectable and all. Not that it mattered, because soon after, Teddy stopped being a shit shoveler and took a job at The Hanging Hoof, probably butchering cows, judging by the blood on his clothes, even though that seemed impossible since Teddy wouldn’t even kill a spider. Not even if it was big as a fifty-cent piece and I was standing on a chair screaming at him to lambast the creepy bugger. Instead he got a plastic cup and an envelope and he trapped the spider under the cup, then slipped the envelope under it for a cover and carried him outside. If Teddy did kill cows at The Hanging Hoof, I told myself, then it had to be one of those
contradictions
. I didn’t know for sure if I was using that word right, though, because when we had it on our spelling list and Mrs. Carlton asked for a sentence using the word, I
raised my hand because I thought I had a good one:
Teddy Favors is a cow-killing, spider-saving contradiction
. But Mrs. Carlton called on Jolene Jackson instead.

It was the same week we had
affliction
on our spelling list and I raised my hand for that word, too, planning on saying:
People who sing while peeing on the toilet probably have an affliction
, but she didn’t call on me that time, either. Which is probably a good thing, come to think of it, because we weren’t supposed to say
pee
in school. Only
restroom
. And I didn’t think that
People who sing while restrooming on the toilet probably have an affliction
was a real sentence, because it didn’t sound right to me.

I looked at the desk at the front of the room. “Mrs. Carlton?” I said. “Is
People who sing while restrooming on the toilet probably have an affliction
a proper sentence?”

Mrs. Carlton looked up from her work and frowned. “Isabella, what does
that
have to do with Moby-Dick?”

I shrugged. “I was just wondering.”

She sighed and told me to get busy, then she went back to grading papers.

I was singing a chorus of “Maybellene” under my breath and looking at the long poster of alphabet letters strung above the chalkboard when Miss Simon appeared in the doorway, papers in one hand while she knocked with the other, even though the door was already open.

She rapped three times but still Mrs. Carlton didn’t look up, so I told her that Miss Simon was there. “Oh, I’m sorry, Debra,” she said. “I heard tapping, but thought it was…” She glanced over at me, then looked back at Miss Simon, who gave her an understanding smile. “Anyway, do come in.”

Miss Simon didn’t look surprised to see me sitting there, but then she wouldn’t have been. When I was in her room, I spent a lot of time inside during recess, too.

They talked in hushed voices as Mrs. Carlton looked over the paper Miss Simon handed her, and I stopped singing so I could catch a word here and there. “What an ingenious program, Debra,” she said in an excited voice.

“Mrs. Gaylor suggested it to our girls’ club as this year’s summer community project,” Miss Simon explained. “She’s going to help us with it.”

“Well, it’s a wonderful idea,” Mrs. Carlton said. “I can think of a few girls who could benefit from this program.” They both looked at me and dropped their voices to whispers.

After Miss Simon left, Mrs. Carlton slipped all of the papers—except one—into her wire basket. She brought that one over to my desk and handed it to me. It had the words
SUNSHINE SISTERS
drawn across the top of the mimeographed page like it was supposed to be Bible-fancy. “What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a new summer program, one I’m hoping you’ll be interested in. I think you’d get a lot out of it.”

I skimmed the page, then looked up and tried not to get distracted by her skinny stretched-out earthworm lips, lipsticked out of the lines to make them look fat. I wondered when she started painting them like that.

“Oh. I get it,” I said after I skimmed the paper some more. “It’s a program where older
good
girls try to help younger
bad
girls learn to act like respectable young ladies.”

Mrs. Carlton leaned her butt against the desk across the aisle from me. “I wouldn’t exactly say that, but it does sound like a wonderful program. They match a grade school student with a high school girl with similar interests, and you spend time together.”

I sat the paper down. “To do what? Schoolwork? Because if that’s it, then I’m not much interested.” The way my hands fell when I folded my arms over the desk, my right hand ended up cupping my left elbow, where the skin was gray and dry and scratchy. I poked my elbow out toward her. “See this, Mrs. Carlton? How my elbows are cracked and gray like little volcanoes? Teddy harped on me all winter about these things, saying that no respectable young lady would run around with elbows that look like this.

“Teddy said this as if there is one thing respectable about me in the first place. Or him, for that matter. We’re poor white trash,
Mrs. Carlton, both of us. And like I once overheard Mrs. Gaylor say at the post office: There’s nothing short of reincarnation that can change poor white trash into something respectable.

“I don’t think Teddy believes there’s such a thing as a hopeless case, though, because he still tries to make me better. Always telling me to wash up good before school, because hand-me-down dresses or not, I should have enough pride in myself to scrub the gray scales from my elbows, put my messy curls back in barrettes so people can see my eyes, and look like a little lady. He harps on me to curb my temper, because little ladies shouldn’t fight like barroom drunks, and he reminds me to stop singing at ‘inappropriate’ times. His harping about that doesn’t do much good, either, because I can’t help singing and humming. Even when I’m sitting on the toilet. You ever hear of anyone doing that, Mrs. Carlton?” I shook my head. “I don’t know. This singing all the time is like an affliction, or something.”

“You call your father Teddy?” Mrs. Carlton asked.

“Oh, Teddy’s not my dad,” I said.

“Oh, yes, that’s right. Mr. Favors is your uncle.”

“My
uncle
? Nah. He’s just the boyfriend Ma left me with.”

The minute those words got out, I thought,
Shucks! I hope I didn’t say something I wasn’t supposed to!
“He’s real respectable, though, even if he’s dirt-poor,” I added quickly. “He taught me to stop swearing… can you believe it? I can’t. You remember when you were on playground duty last year, how many times you had to send me in for cussing? Anyway, Teddy is as good as Jesus. I’m not kidding. Okay, maybe the only affliction Teddy’s gotten out of me so far is cussing, but he never gives up. Course, he should know he’s out of luck changing me on all counts, because the fact of the matter is, no matter how many times I scrub my elbows to bleeding, they still look like this. And no matter how many recesses you make me spend inside for being naughty, you know like I do that the next time you let me loose on the playground, somebody—probably one of the Jacksons—is gonna say or do something to
make me mad and I’m going to scream at them or slug them, or both. Then I’m going to end up right back in here baking like a potato while you do your papers. Not because I want to be bad—I don’t—but it’s like it’s in my blood and I can’t get it out.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Mrs. Carlton, but frankly, I think it might be a situation like with old Mrs. Fry’s dog. He’s so mean that he has to be kept tied all the time, and she has to toss his food to him and scoot his water dish to where he can reach it with a stick. That’s how mean he is! Jack Jackson says the only thing that’s gonna calm that mutt down is a lead pill between the eyes, but Mrs. Fry won’t have him put out of his misery. It’s probably just bad breeding. That’s what Teddy says is wrong with Poochie, anyway. And if that’s the case with me, then you can bet I got that bit of bad blood from my dad’s side. But I’m getting off the topic now, aren’t I? Sorry about that. And sorry to seem ungrateful about this program you and Miss Simon think is so swell, but frankly, Mrs. Carlton, I don’t think no high school do-gooder is going to be able to clean these things out of my blood, do you? Well, not that I even want my affliction for singing fixed, because I love music more than anything.”

Mrs. Carlton’s eyes got soft, like maybe I wasn’t getting on her nerves so bad anymore, even though I was still babbling. She slipped sidesaddle onto the seat of the desk she was resting against, and her voice sagged, too, when she said, “Oh, Isabella. You don’t have bad—”

I interrupted her. “Mrs. Carlton, I sure do wish you’d call me Teaspoon. Every time you say ‘Isabella,’ I’ve got to think about who you’re talking to, because nobody calls me by that name but you teachers. I swear, when you yell at me during class and I don’t shut up, it ain’t so much that I don’t hear you, it’s that I don’t know you’re talking to me.”

“Well, Isabella. A teacher—”

“You know how I got the name Teaspoon?” I asked, because I was sure if she knew, she’d appreciate the name a bit more and
maybe start using it. Mrs. Carlton started to say something, but I thought she was just planning to tell me that she didn’t know, so I continued.

“Well, before my ma and I came here to Mill Town, we lived in Peoria, Illinois, and downstairs there was this tavern. Every Tuesday night, this old guy would come in to dig the coins out of the back of the jukebox and to change up a few of the forty-fives. The first time we were down there, after he got done with his work, he got a few tunes going, and ‘After Midnight’ by Patsy Cline came on. I knew that song because my ma sang it sometimes, so I started singing along.

“I wasn’t more than four years old, so I don’t remember the whole incident, but my ma sure did. And she’d tell the story every time someone asked about my name. She’d tell them how that whole place got quiet when I started singing, people turning around on their stools to look at me, their eyes bugging out of their heads. And when the song ended, the whole crowd exploded with clapping. Well, except the old jukebox man, who was staring at me like he just got gobsmacked.

“When the applause ended, he just stood there shaking his head, and finally he said, ‘Now you tell me how a lil’ bitty baby like that—who don’t look like she got more than a teaspoon of breath in her whole body—can belt out a tune like that!’ Everybody laughed, and from that day on, my name was Teaspoon. And every night we went down there, they’d sit me on the bar, or a stool, and they’d have me sing. Gave me chips and soda pop for doing it, too. And money. I’d put the nickels and dimes or quarters into my pocket and Ma would shake them out each night after I changed into my pajamas.”

Mrs. Carlton’s out-of-the-lines clown mouth smiled a bit.

“Okay, so maybe I did just turn ten last week,” I said, “but let’s face it, I’m still way small for my age, so the name still fits. That bracelet you have on your wrist there? I’ll bet I could slip it clear up my arm to my shoulder, and if I let it go, it would slip right back
down and bounce across the floor. It stinks to be this little, because I get treated like a baby all the time, but I guess I shouldn’t mind because skinny, small girls grow up to have nice figures, while girls who are just-right and filled out by the age of twelve usually grow up to be fat ladies. Anyway, I really do wish you’d call me Teaspoon.
Isabella
is just too fancy of a name for someone like me, don’t you think? When I grow up and fill out and become a glamorous singer, then
Isabella Marlene
is going to fit me like an elbow-length glove, but for now, Teaspoon will do.”