Keeping Secrets (11 page)

* * *

Emma was relieved when the store door slammed behind her. She hated it when they yelled. Afterward everything would get really quiet and her daddy wouldn’t talk for a long time. She couldn’t decide which was worse, the yelling or the silence.

She knew everyone’s house wasn’t like that. Mike’s mother hollered, but only when the kids were bad. She’d smack them on the legs with a belt and everybody would jump up and down like corn popping at the picture show. Then it would all be over and they’d go back outside. Emma spent as much time as she could at the Cloutiers’.

Mike had been waiting for her on his front steps, squinting into the glare, counting Chevys. Emma counted Fords. As of last week, she was ahead.

“She let you?” he asked, handing her a mayonnaise sandwich.

“I told her Linda and Mo are coming, too.”

Mike made a face. Linda’s little sister Mo was a pain in the behind.

Emma shrugged. “They may not, then we’ll just pretend they did.”

They crossed the yard then and walked carefully down the dirt path to the bottom of the canal, each holding a mayonnaise sandwich in one hand and pushing back the blackberry brambles with the other. The blackberries would soon be ripe. They were gigantic, big and sweet, delicious when they were picked in the sun and spurted hot purple juice like jelly into her mouth. But for now Mrs. Cloutier’s sandwiches were enough, the mayo spread thick like frosting on one piece of white bread.

Mike’s mother always had wonderful things to eat. She made banana pudding with vanilla wafers and meringue with little brown tears on the top. Once when Emma was over, they had fried frogs’ legs that Mr. Cloutier had caught with his very own hands.
Gigged
, he said.

“Watch where you’re going, you’re gonna slip.” Mike shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and grabbed her arm as she started to go down. It had rained like crazy the day before, and there were still little patches of wet.

It seemed like it rained every other day in the summertime. One of Emma’s favorite things was to lie out flat on her back in the yard and watch the clouds roll in. She could see them coming from way off in the distance, tall and puffy like scoops of soft ice cream piled one on top of the other until they must reach to heaven. Suddenly the air would change and the wind would come up and then in the distance she could hear the thunder and see the lightning flash. Sometimes if she was by herself she would just lie and smell the rain on the clover. The bees ran and hid from the wet. And even from the middle of the yard she could smell the odor of the hot sidewalks. She’d lie there until her momma yelled at her: “Get in this house before you get struck by lightning.” Did anybody ever or was it just something grown-ups said?

Sometimes if she and the Cloutier kids were playing when the rain started, they screamed and ran with their mouths open, letting the rain fall right in.

The rain didn’t always swell up gradually, though, giving them the choice of whether to keep playing or run inside.

Like right now. Just as she and Mike licked the last of their mayonnaise and started to argue about what game to play, Tarzan or cowboys, the heavens dumped. Following Mike’s yellow head, his hair plastered in strings, she raced into the culvert that ran under the street and squatted down. The bank was only about a foot wide, edging the murky water that, if you fell into it, made you smell green and dead.

It was so dark under the culvert, Emma couldn’t see a thing. Mike inched his fingers carefully and then goosed Emma down the back of her neck.

“Spider!” she screamed.

Mike upped the ante. “Maybe it’s a snake!”

Emma almost wet her pants. “Miiiiike,” she wailed. And then she heard a giggle. “It’s
not
funny!”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“You did, too! You laughed!”

“I didn’t.”

Emma was so wound up in the argument, she forgot the possibility of the spider—or the snake.

“If you didn’t, Mr. Smarty Pants, who did?”

“I did,” said a voice from across the canal.

“Yikes!” Both the children jumped up, crashed into one another, teetered on the edge of the water.

Then their eyes adjusted to the dark. There on the other side, not six feet away, squatted two little colored boys.

Of course she knew that Negroes lived right across the canal. The first house of the Quarters was just behind Skeleton Hill, which was what they called the empty lot with the rise in it bordering the ditch. They never played on the hill, because it was on colored property, but it figured large in their make-believe.

Many of their imaginary creatures lived there, including the Green Skeleton who haunted Emma’s nightmares.

Every once in a while they would see a few coloreds playing on the Quarters side of the canal, but not very often. And when they did, they ignored one another just like when colored kids came into the store. Momma had told her she had to watch the pickaninnies, which she did, but she watched in silence. What would she say? Momma said you couldn’t understand them because they barely spoke English, though a couple of times Emma had asked what they wanted and she had understood. Emma didn’t know many of their names. Most of the time she looked right through them like everybody else did, like they were invisible.

But these kids sitting just across the canal under the culvert weren’t invisible. Now she could see them just fine. She couldn’t smell them, Momma said they smelled, but maybe that was because of the stinky canal.

For a few moments the four of them sat still as if they were playing statue, all squatting on their haunches.

Then Mike moved. “Hey,” he said.

Emma turned her face to him, then realized he was speaking to the boys.

“Hey,” the older of the two said back softly. The sound of his voice seemed to reverberate, wavy like the ribs in the steel culvert overhead.

“My name’s Mike. This,” he nudged her, “is Emma.”

“Hey,” the colored boys both said this time—and stared.

“What’s yours?” Mike asked.

“Marcus,” said the older. “This here’s my little brother James.”

James nodded and ducked his head.

“Hey,” Emma found her voice. Then, because she didn’t know what else to say, she asked, “Where do you live?”

Marcus gestured wordlessly back over his shoulder toward the Quarters.

“We live over there,” Emma volunteered, getting the hang of making this conversation. “Mike lives in the first house. And I live behind the store.”

“We know,” Marcus said.

Emma stared at him in the darkness. How did he know?

Then a shrill sound pierced the darkness. “Mikey? Emma!” It was Linda, calling them.

Mike stood up, stepped over Emma and out of the culvert. Then he poked his head back in.

“Come on, Em. The rain’s over.”

Emma stood and pulled the legs of her sunsuit down. On the other side of the canal Marcus and James stood, too.

“Come
on
.” Mike waved his hand at Emma. “You going to sit there in the dark all day?”

Well, no, she wasn’t. But on the other hand, she wasn’t quite ready to go, either. Emma didn’t know what it was she wanted to do there, or to say, but she felt as if she’d left a gate hanging open somewhere.

“Okay, okay.” She didn’t have Mike to hold on to this time. He was already halfway back up the path. Emma picked her way carefully. Just as she got to the mouth of the culvert, she slipped.

A strong hand caught her arm and steadied her. She stayed. In the bright sunlight, for the rain had been a sudden shower and now had blown away, she looked down at his brown hand on her arm. It made her white skin look whiter.

“Thanks.” She looked down at her sandals, suddenly shy again.

“You be careful, Miss Emma,” the older one called Marcus said, and then they both turned, the younger brother a shadow to the older, and like dark butterflies they were gone.

Up at the top of the path Linda stood with her hands on her hips. Behind her was the fat little busybody, her redheaded sister Mo.

“
What
were you-all doing down there with those niggers is what I want to know.” Mo was the most hateful six-year-old Emma had ever known. She didn’t think Mo was going to live to be seven.

“None of your beeswax,” Mike answered. He shot a look at Emma.

He was right, Emma thought. It was none of their business. But why did she feel so funny about it? Why did she feel like Mo would tell on them if she knew about their sitting in the culvert and talking to the colored boys? Had they done something wrong?

* * *

Later that night, after a supper of macaroni and cheese, she and her daddy listened to
The Shadow
on the radio in the almost-dark living room while her mother did the dishes. It was so creepy, when the door on the radio opened, she could see it.
Cccrrrrreeeaaakkkkkkk.
It was shivery delicious.

“I don’t know why you let her listen to that,” Rosalie called from the kitchen. “You know she’s going to have nightmares.”

“Oh, Ro. What the hike?” His voice didn’t sound happy, Emma thought, but at least they were still speaking.

She loved listening to the radio with her daddy. Sometimes they listened to the Dodgers games too. She adored the Brooklyn Dodgers because they were her daddy’s favorite team.

“Rosalie, it doesn’t hurt her to listen to the radio. She has bad dreams anyway. All kids have nightmares.”

It was true. She did have nightmares. There were things lurking in the dark, waiting to get her.

After
The Shadow
she had her bath in the claw-footed tub and then Momma tucked her in.

“What do you want to hear tonight?”

“‘The Frog Prince.’”

It was one of her favorites from the red book of fairy tales that came with the encyclopedia. Momma acted out all the parts in different voices.

She loved it at the end when the frog turned into a prince.

“But it’s not fair,” she said at the earlier part where the frog insisted that he eat from the princess’s plate and drink from her goblet and sleep in her bed. “Just because he saved her golden ball from the well,” Emma said. “He shouldn’t expect all that. Why was he so greedy?”

Rosalie laughed. Now,
that
was a good question.

“Was he a Jew?”

Rosalie looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

“That’s what they say at Sunday School. That Jews are greedy. What is a Jew, anyway?”

“Put your arms under the cover, and I’ll pin you in.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Under!”

Emma gave up. When her momma and daddy didn’t want to tell her things, it was always like this. She had another question, the one she was really leading up to. Mike had said that his mother said that her daddy was a Jew. Did that mean that she was one, too? Was it something you inherited? Or was it like having polio, something you caught? If she was one, was that bad or good?

“It’s too hot to be pinned in,” she whined.

“I’ll leave the little fan on for a while, until you go to sleep. You know if I don’t pin you, you’ll be afraid.”

Momma was right. If even so much as her little toe was out, the monster under the bed would snatch it.

Or the thing that could get out of her pine clothes closet when the door was left open would grab her.

But the worst was the Green Skeleton who slept on Skeleton Hill in the daytime. As soon as dark fell, it arose, its bones slimy and green like the canal water, and dragged itself, creaking and groaning, off the hill, through the canal, past the Cloutiers’ and up the sidewalk, leaving little globs of slime on her hopscotch traced in chalk. Then it would wait for her just outside the store’s front door, where it crouched, sending messages to her stomach that there was something in the pitch-black store she just couldn’t live without: a Hershey with almonds from the candy counter or a Coke from the big red box filled with blocks of ice.

“There’s no one in there, Emma. If you want a Hershey bad enough, go get it,” Momma said.

But the pull light was over the counter, at the far end near the plate-glass windows. Momma said those thumping sounds were cans falling off the shelves, but Emma knew different. It was the Green Skeleton, who’d already creeeeaaaked the front door open and was waiting for her.

Even if she made it alive to the counter, then she had to stand on the stool and feel around in the dark for the string. What was there to keep him from grabbing her arm and, pop! chewing it off? Once she had touched his finger; she knew it was his finger, cold and icy. She screamed bloody murder, fell off the stool, and cracked her head.

Momma said that was a lesson to her that little girls don’t need chocolate in the middle of the night. Emma thought they did, especially if they didn’t like the bony chicken spaghetti they had for supper and were still hungry, so she hid Hersheys in the dresser drawer with her savings book.

She still had to get up to reach them, worming her way out of the tightly safety-pinned sheets and blankets. Something could still get her, that something that had already sneaked into her room and was waiting for her to get out of bed. But the chances of survival were better than in the store.