Keeping Secrets (12 page)

“Now go to sleep, Emma. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She hoped so. There was no telling what could happen between now and then.

Emma stared into the darkness. Even if the boogeyman didn’t get her tonight, in the morning Momma might ask her about the dollar. What was she going to say then? Maybe she’d wish that the boogeyman had killed her dead.

* * *

Momma had given her the dollar two weeks ago, a crisp new bill from the cash register.

“Now, be careful how you spend it. Don’t go throwing good money away.”

Emma turned and twisted as best she could beneath the tightly pinned sheet. A cold scary hand, even scarier than the Green Skeleton’s, gripped her guts. It was possible that the Green Skeleton lived only in her imagination, but she knew that her mother’s disapproval of her spendthrift ways was very real.

She tried to account for the money in her mind, but even using her fingers, the nickels kept rolling away.

Last Saturday she’d gone to the Strand with the Cloutiers to see a double feature of Lash LaRue, her favorite, and Tim McCoy, her second favorite, along with a Tarzan serial and three Bugs Bunny cartoons. That was twenty-five cents. A bag of popcorn was a nickel. That made thirty.

In the candy store next to the Strand she’d bought two Sugar Babies for a penny, five candy corns for two cents, five chocolate kisses for two more; that was a nickel. And a package of Necco wafers. Another nickel, a dime, that made forty.

Last week she and Mike bought chocolate éclairs at the bakery, though they were really pushing their luck in June. Everybody knew that the custard and whipped cream wouldn’t hold up to the heat, and if you didn’t eat them really fast, you could die of food poisoning, just like you’d get from eating tuna fish and drinking milk. The éclair was fifteen cents. Fifty-five.

At the swimming pool she’d had a chili dog, so good that it made her jaws go
squinch
at the first bite. Fifty-five plus fifteen made seventy.

She had a nickel left in her red coin purse. What had happened to the other quarter? Had she lost it? Maybe it was in the pocket of her shorts. She had to find it, but she knew she was going to be in trouble anyway. She couldn’t tell her momma that she’d spent all that money on food.

“Emma, I swear. You’d think you didn’t live in a grocery store. Just throwing good money away.”

Emma couldn’t explain to Momma how good the chili dog tasted, how the combination of chili, mustard and onions satisfied something deep inside her.

“When I was a little girl we were lucky to have cornbread and buttermilk for supper. We didn’t need fancy things to make us happy.”

Momma disapproved of fancy tastes, exotic chocolate and flaky pastry melting with snowy whipped cream, all thick and rich, luxurious on the tongue. She wouldn’t even try them. She knew they wouldn’t make her happy.

Momma was going to kill her, she knew. She was never going to get another dollar. She’d have to sneak coins out of the cash register or out of the bottom of her mother’s purse if she ever again wanted a little glass dish of vanilla ice cream flooded with hot fudge sauce at Philips’ Drugstore.

Maybe if she tried to do it all over tomorrow with a pencil and paper, she could account for the dollar in a different way. She closed her eyes and turned over, belly down. She’d try to go to sleep now.

She’d think about something good—like St. Jude’s. She loved the Catholic church up the block. Sometimes she and Linda walked over there. It was one of her favorite places, though she never told Rosalie, who said the Catholics wanted to give the country to the Pope—whoever he was.

* * *

The door of the church, next to the school, was always open. No one had ever stopped them from going inside. Even the nuns in black never said a word.

It was quiet and still in the empty church so different from the West Cypress Baptist. On the walls were things called stations of the cross, little statues of Jesus suffering. Emma had watched one day as a nun went around and stopped and prayed beneath each one of them. Down front there was a beautiful altar, silver and gold with a lace cloth and behind it a big statue of Jesus on a crucifix. Emma didn’t like to look at that. She thought it was creepy, all that blood running down. The best parts of St. Jude were the candles and the smells.

In the back, just past the holy water which she always dabbled her fingers into, making them tingly the rest of the day, was a big stand full of candles, most of them burning. There was another one like it up near the altar.

Mike’s big sister had told her that the candles were lighted by people for their dead relatives. The candles’ burning saved them from hellfire for those same minutes. Then why didn’t people burn candles for them all the time? And Baptists didn’t even have any candles, so what kept them from burning in hell? Maybe they had to burn all the time. That’s what the ladies in Baptist Training Union said on Sunday nights, that if the blood of redemption didn’t save you, you’d burn in hellfire forever. She didn’t know how blood could save you or where you got the blood, but the whole thing scared her. She’d come home one Sunday after Training Union screaming about brimstone and damnation, and her mother said maybe just Sunday School and church were enough. She thought so, too, though she didn’t especially like them either. The only good part of Baptists was Vacation Bible School, where she got to cut out things from colored paper and play with white glue that smelled nasty but good and eat cookies with red and green sugar sprinkles and drink lemonade. They didn’t talk about hellfire in Vacation Bible School.

St. Jude’s didn’t need white glue to smell good. There was something, especially right down near the altar that made her nose twitch. Mike’s sister had said it was called incense and that it came, like smoke, out of a silver ball the priest waved in mass. Emma couldn’t picture it, but she loved the smell. It was sharp, like mustard, but there was something woodsy about it, too, like the sticky of pine trees.

That made her think of the woods behind Grandma Virgie’s house where once she’d gone walking with her cousin J.D.

She snuggled, groggy, floating. It would be nice to have a big brother like J.D.—if he were as cute as J.D. Well, she couldn’t have a big brother. What about a little brother or sister? How would that be? She thought about that, hugged her doll closer, and fell asleep.

* * *

“I don’t know why you’re always in such a bad mood. Why do you snap at me so?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. But I told you before, I want to go, Rosalie.”

“Then get on the bus and go.”

“No, I want you and Emma to go, too, now, before she starts school.”

“Why not next summer?”

“Why not this one?”

“You know why. It’s too…dangerous.”

“That’s never going to change, Ro.”

“Somebody will slip. She’ll find out.”

“You think Herb and Rhoda will tell her? Or Ruth? Or George? Or my father? What would they have to gain by that?”

“What about the children?”

“None of them know.”

“How do you know what they might have overheard?”

“Ro, I don’t think my relatives sit around and talk about us. Why should they? They haven’t seen me in almost five years. For all I know, they think I’m dead.”

“Don’t be silly. Ruth writes.”

“Yes. Ruth writes, and Rhoda writes, and they ask when we’re coming to visit so they can meet you and see Emma. They want to see her, you know. And my dad’s not getting any younger.”

“You know I don’t like to travel.”

“I know you don’t like to meet new people.”

“Neither do you.”

“They aren’t new to me, Ro. They’re my family.”

“I’m just scared, that’s all. What if she finds out?”

“If she finds out, she finds out. I always told you it was a mistake in the first place.”

What was? wondered Emma, who had awakened from a nightmare of the Green Skeleton. What was the mistake? Who was? She was?

* * *

She had never seen anything like her Aunt Rhoda’s house in Paterson, New Jersey. She’d never seen anyone like Aunt Rhoda either.

“Sit. Sit,” Aunt Rhoda ordered, waving her bright fingertips at them. Her fingernails were almost the exact same shiny red as the dining-room table she was pushing them toward. The chairs and the table legs were carved with dragons just like the ones Emma had seen in pictures in her fairy-tale book.
Chinese
, her mother had whispered. Emma didn’t think Aunt Rhoda looked Chinese. They had black hair, and Aunt Rhoda’s was red, with short little curls all over her head.
Dyed
, Momma had whispered again.

“Eat. Don’t be shy. Seltzer?” Aunt Rhoda held a silver can with a black top in her hands. Seltzer? It sounded like something you would take for a tummy ache. Aunt Rhoda pushed a button in the black top, and fizzy water filled Emma’s glass.

Now it was Sunday morning. They had all slept late, Emma in an upstairs room with the cousin named Jeri who was asleep when she got into bed with her and already up when she awoke. When Emma went downstairs, they were all sitting around the kitchen talking and drinking coffee.

Emma looked around the table at the adults and picked at the hem of her nightgown. “Do I have to wear a dress to go to church?”

Her Aunt Rhoda laughed and shook a finger at her father, who got a funny expression on his face. “No, no church.” That was okay with her. But now she was starving to death, and she didn’t know what any of the things were on the white lacy tablecloth with the red surface underneath shining through its little holes. And she was afraid to ask.

For one thing, her Aunt Rhoda seemed to think everything she said was funny. “My little Southern shiksa niece,” she kept saying, patting her on the head. Emma thought Aunt Rhoda was pretty funny, too. She sure talked funny. So did Uncle Herb. And now her cousin Jeri on her left. They all sounded a little bit like her daddy. But they didn’t stutter at all.

“Have some lox,” Aunt Rhoda urged, pushing a platter in front of her.

Was that orange stuff called locks? What was she talking about? Emma was hungry; her stomach was growling and her Aunt Rhoda was teasing her. She felt like she was going to cry.

“Show her,” Aunt Rhoda said to Jeri, who took a hard brown roll with a hole in the middle of it, spread it with what looked like thick white butter and layered on the orange lox and raw onion until she had a sandwich. Then Jeri handed her the lox and bagel, as she called it. Emma glanced up at her Aunt Rhoda, who was staring at her. “Eat,” she ordered. Emma did. It was delicious. Before they left the table, she had two of the salty sandwiches. Her Aunt Rhoda laughed and called her Emmale and sent her off to play with Jeri in the basement. Emma had never seen a house with a basement.

In Louisiana the water is just beneath the ground, artesian water that flows at the slightest provocation. And in the spring, the rain and the melting snow from the North cascade down the country, the water swamping up and flooding as it approaches its muddy destination in the Gulf. Unless they’re perched on some elevation, smart people in West Cypress build their houses on stilts or pilings so that water has a harder time rushing in and carrying off their very beds while they’re still asleep. In West Cypress a basement would simply be a hole in the wetland, a certain invitation to trouble that most folks would rather do without.

So it was with amazement that Emma followed her cousin Jeri
down
steps into a large square basement room with walls like the knotty-pine clothes closet in her room at home. In the middle stood a big table. Emma couldn’t reach the top of it, but she could see from where she stood that it was covered with green cloth. Pool, Jeri said. It didn’t look like any pool Emma had ever seen.

* * *

A few days later Emma was standing in the center of a circle of children in her Aunt Ruth’s backyard in Connecticut. “Tell us what you did in New York City,” her cousin Ed demanded.

She told them about the Empire State Building, Nedick’s orange drink on every corner, Macy’s escalators, Coney Island and Nathan’s—wonderful Nathan’s hot dogs, better than at the Cypress Natatorium.

Emma’s eyes grew bluer and wider and her voice higher as she told the children of her adventures, of all the things she had now seen and had never even imagined. But she didn’t tell them the other things she felt. Even if she’d wanted to—and she didn’t because she knew that they weren’t really listening to
what
she said, but rather to the way she said it, giggling and poking fun at her Southern accent—even if she’d chosen to tell them her other feelings, she didn’t have the words for those emotions bubbling up all at once, breaking through iridescent skins and releasing both remembrance and mystery, familiar yet strange. She couldn’t describe how it felt, meeting these people for the first time ever who were the other half of her relatives. Could she tell her cousin Ed that his mother, her Aunt Ruth, with a voice that spoke sweet words, had a touch, a loving soft caress when their flesh met, that made her heart flutter and whisper
Yes, oh, yes!
She didn’t feel this way about her momma’s relatives at all (except J.D.), and she’d known them all her life.

Why, just the other night they had all been sitting out in the backyard, right about where she stood now, and Aunt Ruth was turning the lamb she was cooking on the grill. Emma had never tasted lamb before, nor the salad with something like rice, and tomatoes, and mint. It all smelled so delicious, Emma could hardly wait. And then she didn’t have to, for Aunt Ruth had pulled off little pieces and given her tastes. And then Aunt Ruth had pulled her into her lap when she went and sat down by Uncle George. He had put his arm around Aunt Ruth’s shoulder and pinched Emma’s cheek. They were all tucked together in a kind of warm cocoon.