That Wild Berries Should Grow (2 page)

In the morning, before my parents left to go back home, my mom took me aside. “You're not to worry about your grandmama's ‘ways,'” she said, and she sighed. “Your grandmama means well. Watch her hands and you'll understand her better.”

Before I could ask her what she meant, it was time to say good-bye. Mom and Dad drove off, turning around every inch of the way to wave. When their car disappeared around a bend in the road, I waited for my grandparents to tell me what to do, just like my parents always do. My parents don't exactly
tell
me, but when they start a sentence with “Why don't you …,” I know they expect me to do what they suggest. They suggest all the time.

My grandparents put on matching straw hats. Grandmama said she had to weed her garden. Grandpapa said he was going to prune the apple trees. There were no suggestions for me, so I followed my grandpapa to the orchard.

The trunk of each tree was painted white. “It's a special paint that helps keep away the bugs,” Grandpapa said. “These are apple trees: Jonathan and Rome Beauty, and my Spitzenburg just like we had in the old country. These are peach trees: Mayflower and Elberta and Red Haven. Over there are pear trees: Russetts and Bosc and Bartlett, and the plum trees, Damson and Mirabelle.” He said the names as though he were introducing me to old friends.

Along one side of the orchard is a sort of bank that drops off. When I looked over the edge, all I could see was a spooky-looking tangle of trees and bushes. “What's that?” I asked.

“That's the gully,” he said. “When we have a heavy rain the gully takes a bite out of our land.”

“Gully,” I repeated. From my grandpapa's explanation it sounded like an animal. I save words like some people save stamps or baseball cards. That's a keeper, I thought, repeating it to myself.

I wandered over to Grandmama. All I could see of her was her straw hat sticking up. She was deep in a tangle of flowers, weeding. There were red and yellow and blue flowers, as if someone were trying out all the colors in a box of crayons. “Grandmama, what kind of flowers are they?” I asked politely.

She looked up at me, a little cross at being interrupted. “Cosmy, black-eyed Susans, pansies, lilies, larkspur, daisies, phlox, poppies, and
Vergiss-nicht-mein
, forget-me-nots.” I couldn't remember all the names, so I picked “forget-me-nots” to keep. “Gully, Mirabelle, forget-me-nots,” I said to myself.

I saw that my grandparents were leaving me on my own. If I were in the city I could have done a hundred things: walk to the dime store and wander up and down the aisles, call my friends, bother my aunts and uncles. Just sitting on the apartment porch and watching traffic was more interesting than being here in this empty place.

There was nothing beyond the orchard but fields, so I wandered around to the front yard. A walk leads from the front of the cottage to wooden steps. The steps go down a steep bank to a wide beach and the lake. There were a few fishing boats out on the lake and, almost farther than I could see, a long freighter. Waves splashed against the beach, making a gulping sound. My dad had taught me to swim at Belle Isle, but the lake was so different — so big and rough. I felt as though the big lake were an enormous fish waiting to swallow me. I wasn't ready to go down those steps.

The sounds I heard were strange ones. An orange and black bird, almost too bright to be real, was singing in an apple tree. The wind rattled the leaves of a birch tree. I missed the squeal of brakes and the honking of horns. I missed my friends, even Lucille Macken. I missed the city.

Greenbush

The children

who live in this town

all year round

stand in front

of the drugstore

close as the slats

in a picket fence
.

I can go in
—

because they let me
.

We eat our meals in the kitchen on a table covered with a blue-and-white checked cloth. Lunch today was strange. Grandpapa had a huge bowl of sliced cucumbers with sour cream. Grandmama and I had potatoes that had been fried with bacon and onion. I wanted to say that my mother doesn't allow me to have fried foods, but I thought that might not be polite. Besides, the potatoes were buttery and crisp, and I was hungry. For dessert there were slices of sunshine cake with thick lemon frosting.

It had been months and months since I had seen so much food. I wasn't surprised, though. We had our Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas dinners at my grandparents' home. Grandmama would heap food onto our plates and urge us to eat. I think she knew that there often wasn't much to eat in our own homes. When we were ready to go home she always had big packages of leftovers for us to take with us.

I ate a lot, in spite of the fact that all my grandparents talked about during lunch was worms and rusts and beetles and mildews. These were all things that killed fruit trees dead. You had to get them before they got the trees. The orchard looked peaceful, but I learned there was war out there.

Even the flowers seemed to be in danger. I helped Grandmama with the dishes. When she was finished, she took her dishpan of soapsuds and threw them over her roses. “Keeps the bugs away,” she said. Then she began gathering weeds from the lawn.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“The dandelions are tender this time of year and make a good salad,” she said. “The sorrel will make a good sauce. Taste it.”

I chewed some of the green leaves, and they tasted sour in a nice way.

No one ever told me to go to my room and rest. But now that I could do what I liked, there was nothing to do. “Is there a city near here?” I asked Grandpapa that afternoon.

“A city?” he repeated in a puzzled voice.

“You know. Stores and buildings and things.”

“Why would you want a city when you have the lake and the trees and the flowers?” I guess he saw the disappointed look on my face because then he said, “There is Greenbush.”

“Could I walk there?” I asked. I wanted to find someone my own age to play with. I didn't want to spend the summer with no one but my old grandparents.

“Yah, it's no more than a mile.” He showed me the direction to take. He didn't say that he would have to come with me. Instead, he said, “Stop at the post office and pick up the mail.”

The road into Greenbush curves along fields and past scattered houses and into the small town, which is on a kind of hill. At the bottom of the hill, the lake was watching me as though it had followed me into town. On one side of Greenbush's main street is Crosby's Drug Store, a library, a bank, and the post office. On the other side of the street is Foley's Grocery Store and a store with a sign that says “Hatton's: Furniture and Undertaker.” That's all. It's like someone started to build the town from blocks and then ran out of blocks.

At our post office in the city you just mail your letters and leave. At this post office people stood around talking to one another and to the lady behind the counter. She knew everyone. She even knew me. Before I could say a word she handed me some letters for my grandparents. I was so surprised that I blurted out, “How did you know I was me?”

“It's a small town,” she said. Then she added, “And you're all gussied up.”

“Gussied” was a word to keep. When I looked at the little town I thought of what my father used to say: “All dressed up and no place to go.”

Mother had given me twenty-five cents for summer spending money. I had brought a nickel of that along. I walked up the main street to Crosby's Drug Store, where some boys and girls were talking and laughing together. They were wearing shorts and faded shirts, and they were barefoot. The postmistress was right. I was all gussied up. I had on a dress with a sash tied into a big bow and white socks with patent leather slippers.

I knew I looked funny to them because they stared at me while I walked up the steps and into the drugstore. When I came out with my candy bar, a boy with red hair and watery blue eyes called out, “Look, it's Shirley Temple!” I could hear their giggles all the way down the street. I was so mad I decided I would rather die than be friends with anyone who lived in the town of Greenbush.

As soon as I got home I dug some shorts out of my suitcase. I took off my shoes and socks. I wasn't allowed to go barefoot in the city, but when I came downstairs my grandparents didn't seem to notice. “The woman in the post office knew who I was,” I told them.

“Yah, she knows most things, and what she doesn't know the banker knows, and what he doesn't know Crosby in the drugstore knows,” Grandpapa said.

“And what Crosby doesn't know Hatton, the undertaker, finds out,” Grandmama added.

“There were some children standing in front of the drugstore, and they laughed at me because of what I was wearing.”

“You can find unkindness everywhere,” Grandmama said. “Carl, tell Elsa what happened to us when her mother was a little girl.”

I could see that Grandpapa didn't want to tell the story, but he took a deep breath and said, “It was during the war in 1917. America was on one side of the war and Germany was on the other. There was a shortage of gasoline in America, so they made a law that you couldn't drive your car on Sundays. One day I took very sick. I knew that I must go at once to a hospital.”

“I ran to get our friend, Mr. Ladamacher, to drive us,” Grandmama said. “It was a Sunday, when you weren't supposed to drive, but Mr. Ladamacher said, ‘Never mind. It is an emergency.' As we drove through town on the way to the hospital people called out, ‘The Germans are disobeying the law. They want America to lose the war.'”

Grandpapa said, “But we were Americans, and our son Tom was in the American army.”

“They didn't care,” Grandmama said. “They threw stones at our car. One of the stones broke a window.”

“Gussie, that was a long time ago. We should forget it. Now we have many friends in the town. Why should we frighten Elsa?”

It's hard for Grandmama to forget things that make her unhappy, but Grandpapa is like his paintings, which are all bright colors.

The Screen Porch

A room
,

not outside
,

not in
,

but holding me

in airy

captivity
,

while all about

birds

and bees

fly free
,

and caged
,

I look out
.

One day I got a letter from Lucille Macken.

Saturday afternoon we got to go to the movies. They had tap dancing lessons first and then an hour of cartoons and two serials and a double feature. We were at the movies for five and a half hours!!! I stopped at the dime store afterwards and bought a Tangee lipstick!!!

I hate it when someone uses a lot of exclamation points. I hate it when someone tells you what a good time they had someplace when you weren't there.

There was nothing to do but read. I spent a lot of time on the screen porch, curled up on the swing with a book. I felt safer on the porch than I did outdoors. Outdoors there were ants, spiders, beetles, mosquitoes, fish flies, ladybugs, bumblebees, hornets, caterpillars, worms, snakes, toads, mice, and chipmunks. Something was always buzzing around my head or crawling up my leg. I didn't understand why there had to be so many extra things.

From the porch I could keep an eye on the lake. One day it is quiet, smooth, shiny, and bright blue like my mother's good silk dress. Another day it is dark green and noisy, with foaming waves that eat up the shore. You can't depend on the lake.

If my parents were here they would ask, “Why don't you go down and splash around in the lake?” My grandparents let me do as I like. Sometimes when they come upon me suddenly they seem surprised to find me here.

What they have noticed is that I've been eating a lot. “Soon you will be less
spärlich
,” my grandmama said. That means thin. And the hammer in my head has stopped. No more headaches. That doesn't mean I like it here though. One day at lunch I complained, “There's nothing to do.”

My grandparents looked up from their angel food cake as if they couldn't believe what they heard. “You must get outside more. You can't just stay like a captive in that screen porch,” Grandpapa said. “You can help us in the garden.”

“Elsa must have her own garden,” Grandmama told him.

That afternoon Grandpapa dug up a part of the field at the end of the orchard. All the grass and weeds disappeared, leaving a large square of bare earth. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “There you are, Elsa. Now you'll have something to do.” He grinned at me, his eyes very blue in his tanned skin, his gray hair tousled from the breeze that blows off the lake.

Grandmama said, “What do you want to grow?” She held out packets of seeds with pictures of vegetables and flowers on them. I would have liked to grow just flowers, but then I remembered how Mother would look longingly at the fresh vegetables in the store. She would study the prices, and then with a shake of her head she would choose carrots or cabbage, which were the cheapest vegetables to buy. I imagined filling bags full of vegetables from my garden and taking them home to her. I guess I had some idea that the vegetables would grow overnight, because I'd decided that I was going to find some way to get back home. And soon.

I picked out beans and tomatoes and lettuce and peas. Then, because I liked their bright colors and their name, I pointed to a package of snapdragons. Grandmama showed me how to stretch a string from one end of my garden to the other to make straight rows. The seeds were so tiny that you could hardly see them. I put them one by one into the ground and patted them down. The earth felt warm under my hand. Grandpapa filled the tin sprinkling can from the rain barrel and carried it to my garden for me. As I sprinkled, the water turned the ground a deep rich color. I could feel the seeds drinking.