Playing With Matches (7 page)

Miss Thorne snatched her roll sheet. “Clea Shine,” she said, “if you are quite through, I can speak to these girls without your help.”

But I was wounded and definitely not done. “Miss Thorne, this room is a sad disgrace. You got no decent books. Why, look at that wall map—the Pacific Ocean is purely faded out.”

There was not a sound in the room, from the hall or outside. Even the very air held still.

“Clea
Shine
! Take your seat!” Miss Thorne calmed herself. “I can see you are—knowledgeable.” She spoke that fine word as if it hurt. “But you will keep your mouth closed, and you and I will talk after school.”

I sat and sulked. Later, I might get a chance to ask if we were going to cover the wars in Europe and Korea and do science experiments in which we would make fog and arcs of electricity. But just now, around the room, all the girls smirked and made knowing faces at one another.

I slid into my seat and folded my hands. I dared not take a breath. Claudie had said I used
fancy words
? I was surprised to see
so many big kids hunched over these little desks, and it came to me that most of them were repeating Year One—and many had probably repeated it before. Further, it was true that I did not like Plain Genie. She filled up my head with her whining. She was like the sticky Mississippi mud that sucked at your shoes. But did Claudie have to go and announce it?

For now there was nothing to do but suffer the indignity of printing ABCs on primary paper.

To my great relief, we went outside at recess, and although I looked for the twins, I didn’t see them. On a square of blacktop, a couple of jump-rope teams had formed, but when I approached, they all stepped away or turned their backs or coiled up their ropes like they were done anyway, and that surprised me. I was a champion jumper.

At noon I dragged myself home for lunch. Auntie made me a grilled cheese, and while I poked it with my finger and tore at the crust, she asked me how the day was going. I said, “Fine.”

She asked—
wasn’t I hungry
? I lied and said we’d had graham crackers for a snack. I felt empty, all right, but grilled cheese would not fill me.

In the afternoon, Miss Thorne called on me to come to the chalkboard and copy down numbers. We would learn to add apples. While her back was turned, I added to each number a string of zeroes. Some in the class snickered, but when Miss Thorne looked, they went quiet as scared mice. She asked me why I had done that.

“Because, Miss Thorne, two apples aren’t enough to feed a family. It would take bushels to fill the bellies of False River, so I thought it more useful to create two thousand—”

Nobody could shush a room like I could.

By three o’clock, Miss Thorne looked tired even though the
year had just started. Everybody else left; I stayed in my seat, my hands folded on the desk. With all my heart I hoped she’d ask me how this class should be run.

“Come here, Clea,” Miss Thorne said softly. “I can see that you are an intelligent and outspoken young lady. And while intelligence is an asset, it sometimes causes problems for your fellow students. Beginning tomorrow, I want you to sit on the other side of the room. At the back. In the corner.”

“But that’s Year Two!”

Miss Thorne sighed. “Clea, you already know more than most of these first-graders ever will.”

Why did that sound like a not-good thing?

“Tomorrow the principal will administer a test so we can officially pass you into Year Two.”

I wasn’t so sure. “I don’t subtract.”

Miss Thorne cocked her head. “Child, what is the capital of these United States?”

“Washington, D.C.,” I replied, “though it wasn’t always. It—”

“Don’t worry,” she said drily. “You’ll do fine.”

Outside, where the shadows were long and the day was closing down, Claudie and Plain Genie had not waited for me. What awful sin had I committed that everyone was treating me like the leper in the Bible—and where was Jesus when you needed him, with his outstretched hands and barefoot followers and his flock of sheep? But sheep didn’t do well in Delta country, and Jesus would never come to False River.

Maybe Uncle Cunny had been wrong to instruct me in mathematics and history. I walked home, sad to the bone and not sure why.

The problem with second grade was that it dragged like a line of rained-on wash. Every Monday Miss Thorne spat out a new bit of history or geography, then hammered it in until I no longer cared. The pace was enough to make me yank out my hair.

I began to smuggle the Reverend’s books to school in the back of my pants. I had finished
Jo’s Boys
and proceeded to a biography of Louisa May Alcott. Oh, how I loved to think that that lady sat at her desk, penning pages of story just for me.

I had an idea. I would ask Auntie for a clean pad of paper, and I would write my own book. While I was miserable in one life, I would live in another.

In the classroom, I figured how to prop up my raggedy copy of
Dick and Jane for Year Two
and, in its shadow, cleverly conceal my copy of
Heidi
. I loved Heidi and Peter but was crazy about Clara, bound to her wheeled chair and waking up to the world.

I didn’t care if I was caught. I had a greater problem—second grade meant subtraction. Miss Thorne had thoroughly explained the concept, but I balked. Day after day I left my mimeographed sheet blank.

Then one morning it came to me that, while I rested my chin in my hand, my other four fingers had nothing to do. I reasoned that each one might represent a number—pointer finger for single digits, the middle one fives, the ring finger tens, and my pinkie one-hundreds. In this way, I could stroke my face while removing oranges from a crate, or bread loaves from a basket, and not a single person in False River went begging. It allowed me to fill in the blanks on my paper.

More than once, I caught Miss Thorne watching me, eyes narrowed,
head cocked, as I stroked my cheek. But I was ecstatic. This new method allowed me to add and subtract long strings of numbers without connecting them to my life in any manner.

I was already the most unpopular kid. I was never included in games at recess, and I’d developed what Miss Thorne began to call insolence. That word hurt me to the core, and I ran all the way home to tell Auntie that I was never going to school again.

I wouldn’t come down from the attic for dinner. Auntie hollered and stomped, then spoke softly and cajoled. I sat on the top step while she reasoned away my mountain of problems—stupid books, baby classmates, that infernal slow-slowness with which they were teaching me. Auntie said my imagination was probably making it worse.

I didn’t tell her that Claudie and Plain Genie ran away when they saw me. I stomped down the stairs, planted my feet, and said it square on. “Auntie, nobody likes me ’cause I’m too smart.”

“Oh, Clea June—”

“I don’t think Miss Thorne’s ever heard of the Battle of Waterloo. Uncle should’ve left me soft-minded and ignorant. I didn’t fit into Year One at all, and I sure as aces don’t like Year Two. I don’t belong anywhere!” I wailed.

“You belong here,” Auntie said and hefted me, long-legged as I was, into the rocker and against her soft bosom. Through my fierce anger and my pain, I listened to the squeak beneath our weight, and felt Auntie’s stoutness as a mighty fortress.

Miss Thorne, she assured me, had indeed heard of the Battle of Waterloo. Did I want Auntie to call and talk with her?

“No.”

Did I need Auntie to walk me to school?

No. Through tears I asked, “But—could I have paper? And
pencils, sharp pencils?” The pages of my old notebook were written on, full of scribblings that seemed infantile. My two pencils were worried down to nubs.

“Well,” Auntie said. “I suppose so. Meanwhile—would you like to walk over to the Maytubbys’ with me? Look in on their missus, take them a jar of jam?”

Oh, misery
, I thought. Plain undecorated hurt. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. “No,” I said. Then, “Yes, Auntie, please.”

But friendship, it turned out, was dandelion fluff. I sat on the Maytubbys’ porch and waited for Auntie while the children scattered, and I was left with my sorry and broken heart.

Claudie didn’t talk to me for the rest of the year, and school plodded on, one day oozing into the next.

Then summer came.

It meant cool dips in the shallows, and the Fourth of July. Like everyone else along the False River, we lined up our chairs and drank lemonade and watched sparklers and bottle rockets zing over the water and listened late into the night while Black Cats banged and made all the dogs howl.

10

O
ne night after dark, I slipped out the window and down the drainpipe and lattice, and over to Mama’s house. I stood on the porch, looking in through the window. A single lamp was lit in the parlor and Mama was dancing to the radio—slow, bluesy music, her steps long and smooth. She had a bottle in her hand. The hem of her dress was caught over one wrist, lifted and whirling like a red wing.

I went in through the kitchen and leaned in the doorway.

“Well, hi, there, darlin’,” she said. “Where you been?”

I didn’t bother with an answer. I never did. She’d put me at Auntie’s, so she damn well knew.

“Come on in here an’ let me show you a few steps.”

I eased out on that wood floor that was polished by my mama’s feet, and a hundred men. I knew they paid for more than a dance.

She must have had a good day. “Come on upstairs, girlie girl, and let’s see what trouble we can get into.”

The steps were steep and narrow, and I wondered what it would have been like, growing up in this house. There was an old refrigerator in the kitchen, but I never saw food on her table and
I didn’t know what was behind the cabinet doors. The bathroom was off the kitchen. I’d guessed it was for company. I’d used it a time or two, thinking of the men in gray uniforms who’d stood there peeing in the way that men do, hitting everything but the bowl. The floor was always sticky, and I dared not touch the seat.

Upstairs, there were beds in all three rooms, and each was made up with fine sheets and a pretty spread. In Mama’s room, in her private space, every surface was filled with glass bottles of nail polish and rouge, eyeliner and hair color, foundation creams and stopper-topped perfume.

She sat down on a low bench in front of the little table she called her vanity. She picked out a few bottles. “Come over here, darlin’. Let’s see what you look like all shined up.”

That was a joke.

“Shine” was our name. I was Clea June, daughter of Clarice Shine who owned five hundred kinds of sweet-smelling things. “Go on and let that bottom lip hang down for me,” she said.

And I did, while she swiped lipstick on me, and powdered and rouged my cheeks, and I closed my eyes tight while she brushed on color and thickened my lashes. She clipped earrings on my ears. I could feel them bump-bump against my neck.

“Now see?” she said. “Lookie there at your elegant self.”

I opened my eyes. What I saw in that mirror stole away my breath. I
did
look like her, peach-shaded and rosy, scarlet cheeks and lips. She stuck a silver comb on top of my braids.

“Well,” she drawled. “Don’t you look fine.”

And then it was gone, that soft curve of her mouth. It stretched out thin. “Go on now. Get out and leave me in peace.”

She followed me down the narrow stairs, and sank to the floor like her knees were liquid. “ ’Fore you go, bring me them smokes, girl, and the matches too.” She coaxed out a Marlboro with her
long red nails. “Light it up,” she said. “Go on. God, do I got to tell you six times? Put it ‘tween your lips. Now do the damn match.”

But I wasn’t good at striking them, and pretty soon a lot of half-burnt matches lay on the floor. Finally, she showed me how to hold it, how to draw on the cigarette till I coughed, and the end sparkled and glowed.

She might be drunk, but here was something no other kid was privy to. She took the thing and puffed away while the taste roared terrible on my tongue and in my throat. My tummy clutched up. Mama sent streams of smoke into the air.