Apron Strings (7 page)

“Let go a’me,” I said, shaking Gordy’s sweaty hand from mine.

“Honey, you hol’ his hand, now. We gotta cross the street right chere. Now,” she said. She grabbed my free hand and proceeded across the street, dragging me like the tail of a kite.

From what I could see, Ethel’s dentist must have lived in his office. The building looked like someone’s house. It had a crusty porch that was as lopsided as the roof, barely clinging to the front of the red brick structure. The gray floorboards were scarred and rotten. They looked as if they’d been gnawed on.

“Sit on the stoop an’ don’ let me catch you off it when I git back,” Ethel instructed us.

Gordy and I perched on the edge of the porch and dangled our legs over the side. Ethel disappeared with Helen into the darkness of the office. Every so often we could see someone peering out the door glass to check on us. We watched from the porch as people walked by. Only if a passerby called out, “Morning,” would we say hello.

The taxi office next door offered up considerable interest. Drivers sat behind the steering wheels of their cabs with the windows rolled down, talking to a man inside the office. He was smoking cigarettes and complaining about the heat. When he wasn’t reporting about how much he could drink or who he saw somebody out with last night, he was answering the phone then shouting destinations and instructions out the window. After a driver received an address from the man in the office, he’d pull away in his cab. But there didn’t seem to be any pattern. One cab and driver sat idle the whole time we were watching from the porch, while another, which had just pulled up, left moments after the man shouted an address out the window.

I moved over and stood up in the weeds just off the porch. Gordy, his pale eyes filled with concern, warned, “You better get back here before Ethel catches you.” I slouched back onto the porch and scowled at my older, wiser brother. But his advice was good. Just then Ethel emerged from the door with Helen.

As we walked downtown, Ethel released my hand and let me skip ahead with Gordy, giving a cautionary grunt if we ventured too far ahead. I had to tug on Gordy to get him to do much skipping, but after a
while he acquiesced. We skipped along as high and as fast as our overseer behind us would allow.

Our next stop was a tiny office with a large metal and glass door. Big white letters read, “Public Finance Company.” Metal venetian blinds covered the windows like aluminum foil: all dull, dirty, and bent at the edges. My mother said venetian blinds were tacky, but I liked them. I’d play with them whenever I got the chance, snapping the slats up and down to cast ribbons of sun and shadow over a room. I was wise enough to gather that the blinds in the public finance office were off-limits to children. Ethel grunted as she pushed open the big door to the office.

There was a man in a shortsleeved shirt and a greasy tie sitting behind a massive ugly, gray desk that bisected the room. The fabric of his shirt was so thin you could see his sleeveless undershirt through it. Two gray metal chairs sat on our side of the desk. There were magazines scattered haphazardly on the windowsill along with a couple of dusty looking plants. Gordy and I stood in front of the desk beside Ethel. She set Helen down and pulled out a frayed little book, just like the little books my daddy had. He called them our “saving accounts.” Ethel’s book was wrapped in a rubber band. She also pulled out her change purse and took out some money. After removing the rubber band, she handed the book and her money to the man. He unfolded the money, counted it, and then wrote something in Ethel’s book. He picked up a stamp from his desk, smacked it down on a big black pad, and stamped the book at a precise spot. As he returned it to Ethel, his thin mustache twitched like a horse’s back when a fly lands. There was an ugly black stain on the edge of his hand from the inkpad. He placed the money in a drawer. Ethel carefully rewound the rubber band around the book and said something pleasant to the man. They both laughed, though he didn’t look like he thought it was funny.

Even though the room was so small that you could sling a cat from one end of the room to the other, the man pretended not to notice that the door was proving to be problematic for us to open. Ethel had her arms full of Helen and her belongings. Gordy and I weren’t big enough; try as we might, we didn’t have the heft to move it. Ethel tried to pull
the door without disgorging herself of her load, but she couldn’t. She put Helen in a chair, pulled the door open, instructed Gordy to hold it, picked Helen up again, grabbed my hand, and went through, checking herself to make sure she had everything she came with. As we emerged, Gordy stood still as a post, holding the door. She told him to come along, muttering and fussing as we walked down the street.

Then a friend of Ethel’s spotted us. “How ya doin’, Miz Ethel?” the woman said. “Is them Mr. Mackey’s chil’ren? Mighty fine lookin’, they is! Ya keepin’ pretty good? Hot, ain’t it?” Ethel held Helen on her hip as she chatted. Whenever Gordy and I ventured farther down the sidewalk than she thought we should, she’d grunt in midsentence to call us back. Before long, we were on our way again. The bus stop was in front of the bakery, and this was always our last errand. No trip downtown was complete without a cookie for the four of us to share on the bus ride home.

As we looked over the counter, mulling over just which cookie to buy, Mrs. Dabney walked into the shop. “Hey, Miz Dabney,” I said, skipping over to her. “Are you gonna be riding the bus, too?”

“Well, what a surprise,” Mrs. Dabney said. She smiled and patted me on the head, then ordered a half dozen dinner rolls. “My darling little neighbor children, what brings you down this way?”

I heard the bus hiss to a stop, and then Ethel hustled us outside with barely a glance in Mrs. Dabney’s direction. Mrs. Dabney waved to me as she came out of the shop and the bus door smacked closed behind us.

A week or two later it had, thankfully, cooled off a bit. While Ethel made mayonnaise, I watched with my head nestled in the crook of my arm and my legs swinging lazily up against the chair legs. “Was it ‘cause my granddaddy gave her the locket? Did he git to decide whose picture is in it? Was he the boss of everything?”

“What you talkin’ ‘bout?” she asked as she worked the mayonnaise churn up and down.

“Momma told me that she put Cy’s picture in her locket. You know Cy what took care of Momma’s horses, True Love and Puddin’?”

Ethel chuckled. “Whew wee, I bet them was some fireworks,” she said. “Ol’ Mista Stuart would have been righ’ smart hard on Miz Ginny
‘bout that had he known. Miz Ginny was hiz prize n’ joy. He spoilt that child rottn’.”

“That’s why she thinks he’s so great?” I asked.

“Yea, honey, that man thought the sun rose an setted on yo’ mama. Ya know she was his only girl. Mista Gordon and Mista Jimmy worried yo’ granddaddy and Miz Bess sick with the shenanigan day gots up ta. And Mista Dennis, he weren’t never right in the head, po’ soul.”

“Why was he mean to Granny Bess?”

“Who was mean to Miz Bess?”

“Granddaddy.”

“Who say he was?”

“I don’t know. She lived in that little house. He didn’t give her his big one when he died. That’s mean, isn’t it?”

“He’d done lost all his money.”

“Why?”

“He was a drunk,” she said, finishing the mayonnaise. She put it away in the cupboard and walked over to the sink to peel eggs. “Befo’ the accident he used to hole up in the Annex on a drankin’ binge. Nobody’d see ‘im fo’ weeks, ‘cept Miz Bess. She’d tend ‘im and you’d hear him yellin’ an’ cussin’ clear down to the kitchen. After a while he’d give it up. You know—clean hisself up an’ go on ‘bout his bid’ness. Then somethin’ would set ‘im off again. I don’t ‘spect ya can hang on to yo’ money an’ keep that kinda livin’ up fo’ long,” she said philosophically.

“What accident? I never heard about any accident.”

“Never you mind, girl…just talking through my hat, thas all. Go’n out and play, now.” She said as she bustled a bit more than was her nature.

“What’s for dinner?” I asked as I slipped out of the chair while gravel crunched in the drive. I slunk off to the window to check; sure enough my mother was just getting out of the car.

Later that day Ethel took a rare afternoon off. That left us at home with my mother. I found her alone in the sitting room playing solitaire.

“Don’t you have to go riding today?” I should have known better than to have asked, but I wasn’t thinking.

“Ethel had something she had to do at the last minute and she couldn’t find a sitter.” She rolled her eyes and sighed, sounding exasperated.

“Oh, you wanna play war?” I asked as I looked for another deck of cards.

“Sallee, it is—
want to
. The question you are asking is: Do I want to play war?” She looked at me intensely as if her look could somehow make me speak properly. Then she acquiesced, “If you’d like,” she gathered the cards up into a deck. “How do we play?”

“You cut the deck in half if you don’t have two decks, and give me one, and you put down a card and then I put down a card and the highest one wins. If they are the same then you spell ‘war’, and then the highest one wins.”

“Who taught you how to play this game?” she asked as she handed me half of the deck.

“Daddy taught me and Gordy.”

“Gordy and me,” she corrected.

“Daddy taught Gordy and me. We play it with him all the time. Do you want to play?” I turned a card over and looked up at her expectantly as I rested my chin on my arm.

She placed a king on my six. I asked, “Didn’t you play this with Granny Bess when you was little?”

“You were,” she corrected. “No, Mother didn’t play cards.”

“I was what?” I looked at her quizzically, then shrugged and continued. “Did you play with Granddaddy then?”

She shook her head, “He only played bridge and solitaire. Not games for children.”

“Two twos,” I exclaimed, “this is when you spell w-a-r and ... don’t turn ‘um over, you put’m upside down like this.” I slipped three cards off the stack in front of me and arranged the cards face down, carefully stair stepping them just as I had seen my father do, then waited while my mother followed suit.

“My brothers played cards with each other, but not with my father. My parents didn’t play games with their children.” Her perfect red nails clicked on the table as she placed each card down exactly as I did.

“Now you turn this one over. I win!” I shrieked as I struggled to gather up my winnings. In my triumph, I carelessly picked up my line
of questioning again. “At least not when they was in the Attic, right?” As soon as I said it, I could have kicked myself. I had just broken Ethel’s unspoken law. I braced myself for the reaction.

“What? Attic what are you...? Is it over?” she asked as she went to gather up all the cards. Her gold bracelets jingled while her long elegant nails clicked on the cards; her movement was at once both graceful and tense.

“No, we still have lots of cards.” Relieved, I let out a long slow breath. “See,” I pointed to our stacks. “Did you have any friends in the neighborhood you could play with?”

“We didn’t live in a neighborhood. We lived on a farm. Daddy had a good friend who lived on the next farm over. He had a daughter ten years older than me. She wasn’t much of a playmate.”

“Ethel lived there, didn’t she? You coulda played with her.”

“Ethel’s mother, Bertha, had worked for my parents for some years in the kitchen. I didn’t know Bertha like you know Ethel now. It was different then. All I remember of her was that she had a kind voice…” My mother’s voice trailed off as she played with the edges of the cards I dealt her, looking thoughtful. Finally, she continued, “I don’t remember meeting Ethel until just before I married your father. When she was a child, she worked at a boarding house. Later on she worked for another family, and then she came to work for your father and me.”

“I thought…” I started and then remembered that it was Ethel who told me “…uhh that you um played—that you and Ethel were friends like Lil’ Early and me.”

“I never played with Ethel. Where would you have heard such a thing?”

“I guess I just thought it up,” I lied knowing that Ethel told me that she had known my mother since she was a young girl.

After a double war that she won, my mother scooped up all of the cards and dealt out a game of solitaire. “Why don’t you go outside and play with your brother and sister?”

“It’s raining.”

“Well then don’t go outside.”

I left the room as the cards clicked on the table.

Before everything changed, my mother spent most of the day at luncheons or meetings or horseback riding with friends. Whatever she did took her away for most of the late morning and afternoon, and just before our dinnertime she would rush into the house, race upstairs and change into a pretty dress. She must have taken a bath first, but I don’t know how she had time. She always smelled sweet and flowery. Her gold bracelets jangled on her arm, and her lipstick was freshly applied like she was going to a party. It must have taken some serious time, but it seemed like magic. Her soft blonde hair would be done up in a chignon; pearls encircled her long graceful neck. One minute she was in a suit or riding clothes and then, as if her fairy godmother had waved a wand, she was all dressed up. She would greet my father in a cloud of sweet perfume with a drink and a kiss as he came in the door.

Usually, he entered with one, if not all three of us in tow. We would wrap ourselves around his legs and stand on his feet. He’d heave us all in the door while wondering out loud why it was so hard to walk. A favorite thing for us to do was to wait for him at the bottom of the driveway. As soon as his big, black Cadillac pulled into the drive, he’d throw open the door. We’d clamber onto the doorjamb, oftentimes before the car came to a full stop. He would hold us tightly while he slowly drove up to the house with the door wide open. The tiny breeze felt like wind as it whipped through my hair. Knowing how forbidden this would be if my mother knew heightened every sensation. I gazed up into the bright blue sky as I leaned against my father’s strong sure arm, arching my back and pointing one foot as I had seen an aerialist do at the circus. As we came in the front door, my mother shooed us away like flies. “Run along, children. Your daddy’s tired. I’m sure your dinner is about ready.”