Dicey's Song (15 page)

Dicey got back to her work, trying to see the picture Millie had been looking at: Gram a young woman, like Momma, and her three children. Momma and Bullet and John, all of them in a race. Bullet would have been last because he was smallest. Unless Momma hung back to let him beat her. That was the kind of thing Dicey thought Momma would have done. She wished she could ask Gram if that was the way it happened.

The trouble with holding on was Dicey only had two hands. She felt like she was always off balance, trying to hold on to everyone. What happened next to put Dicey off her stride was that Millie remembered a message from Gram. The message told Dicey to wait at work until Sammy showed up.

“I thought you-all didn't have a phone,” Millie remarked.

“Gram decided we needed one,” Dicey told her. Dicey had finished the floor and put away the mop and bucket. They sat side by side at the checkout counter. Millie told Dicey what to order from the distributor and how much. Dicey wrote the number in, then quickly did the multiplication to figure out price. Working beside Millie, sitting beside her, made Dicey feel small and quick. She had to be careful not to let that feeling lead her to making mistakes in calculation.

“Ab always did make her mind up quick and stick to it,” Millie commented.

“Did she?” Dicey asked. “What do you mean?”

“I dunno,” Millie answered. “Like with Cilla, her sister. You ever know Cilla?”

Dicey shook her head.

“It's funny I remember this, because I was so young, maybe just six. Ab was even younger, but I remember her saying she'd never like her sister, because Cilla was plain-out silly.”

Dicey tried to picture her grandmother at five years old, or even seven. She couldn't. All she could picture was a midget Gram, shortened and shrunken, and with those dark, impatient eyes.

“It surely is a blessing for Ab that you turned up,” Millie said. “I guess no matter what your Momma did, Ab is happy to have you.”

“You think so?” Dicey asked.

“I guess she's more like her old self these days,” Millie said. Dicey believed what Millie was saying because however stupid Millie might be at reading and numbers she had known Gram all of her life. And she had liked Gram all those years.

So Dicey was feeling pretty good, until Sammy came slouching into the store. The minute Dicey saw his face, his jaw stubbornly stuck out and his eyes daring her, she started to worry. She talked to him as she rode him home on her bike. “Where were you?”

“Detention.”

“What for?” she asked, trying to sound as if she didn't care much.

“We had a bet, me and Ernie and some guys, and anyone who lost had to kiss Margaret. In class.”

Dicey pumped her legs down and up. Sammy sat on the seat, holding onto her waist with his arms. He stuck his legs out to help with the balance.

“What was the bet?”

“You had to do ten chin-ups. I only did six.”

“What about the rest?”

“They've got a club, you know? Ernie's president and he has a gym in his basement — and barbells too, he says. They did ten easy.

Dicey nodded her head. She pumped. She didn't much like the sound of this bet. Or of this Ernie kid. Sammy had said he was bigger, older than the rest of the class.

“Dicey?” Sammy asked.

“Yeah?” She turned her head a little to hear him better.

“Do you think we could put an exercise bar in the barn? They said I did good for the first time trying.”

“I dunno, Sammy,” Dicey said. “We could try.” The way it sounded to Dicey, the boys had set up a bet they knew only Sammy couldn't do. Dicey didn't mind bets and double dares, but this one didn't sound fair.

“When I kissed her, she screamed bloody murder. You should have heard her, Dicey, she scared Miss Tieds half out of her pants. I only pecked her once, on the cheek, and it wasn't any fun. But — it was fun when Margaret screamed.” Dicey could hear giggles mounting in his voice. He couldn't see her face so she went ahead and grinned.

“Then what happened?”

“Miss Tieds yelled at me for a while.”

“What about Ernie and the rest?”

“They didn't do nothing; why should they get in trouble?”

Dicey saw his point. “Is there anybody else besides Ernie and his friends, anyone else you like?”

Sammy thought about that. “There's a kid — Custer. He's named after a general. Do you know? He fought at the battle of Little Big Horn. But he's already got lots of best friends. Ernie calls him Custard. But he sure can play soccer.”

Dicey thought she'd ask James about these kids, what they were like.

Gram rode with Sammy on his paper route that afternoon, because it was getting dark so early. She took Dicey's bike. Dicey and James and Maybeth worked together in the kitchen. A chicken was roasting in the oven, and Maybeth had to get up to baste it every now and then, which gave James a chance to report to Dicey. “I asked Mrs. Jackson, and she gave me some second grade readers,” he told her.

“Good for you,” Dicey said. “How's it going, do you think?

“OK,” James told her. Dicey wasn't sure she could believe him. James asked Maybeth to sit down and read out loud from a book he'd gotten from the school library. It was a silly little book, filled with rhymes and bright pictures. The story didn't make much sense, not real sense, just silly sense. It was about someone called Sam-I-Am, who kept trying to get his friend to eat green eggs and ham. Maybeth read it and giggled and kept reading. The way she read it, the poetry sounded like poetry, and she didn't make any mistakes. Dicey praised her.

“It's a baby book,” she said.

Dicey looked at James. “Sure,” he said, “But —” Dicey didn't know if he was talking to her or Maybeth. “Did you hear how well she read it? You had to understand everything to get the jokes. More than just the words. They said in my book that learning to read with phrasing and fluently, that was a sure sign.”

“A sure sign of what?” Dicey wanted to know.

“Someone who can read,” James answered. “It's not an easy book to someone who can't read. Is it?” he asked Maybeth.

She smiled and shook her head.

“And the books Mrs. Jackson gave me —” His whole face lit up. “She's sure gonna be surprised. She doesn't know me — she doesn't know what we're doing — I wish I could see her face when she figures out what's happening.” He sounded so sure of himself.

“Is it happening?” Dicey asked.

James let Maybeth answer. “I think so. I didn't remember what the letters say — then when James wrote them down on the cards, I remembered from before. I remember most of them. I knew them. But I didn't know how to remember them.”

“So now our real job is to build up your sight vocabulary,” James said. Dicey almost asked him what that was, but she figured she could guess, and he was eagerly pulling out a pack of flash cards to drill Maybeth. Maybeth was just as eagerly giving him her attention.

If it wasn't one thing, it was sure going to be another, Dicey said to herself when Sammy came in from the paper route the next day. He had cuts and bruises on his face and on his knuckles too. When she saw him, she just stared. She looked at Gram. Sammy didn't say anything. Gram said, “He looks better now than when he first got home. We cleaned him up some.”

“It wasn't in school,” Sammy assured Dicey.

“On the bus,” Gram said, drily.

“Who'd you fight?” Dicey asked.

“Some kid,” Sammy said. He thought for a minute and then told her, “He was bigger'n me and a good fighter.”

“But why?” Dicey burst out.

Sammy shook his head, no. He wasn't going to tell her.

Dicey looked at Gram's worried face and knew the same expression was on her own. She could have laughed. Here they were, getting what they wanted for Sammy, and they began worrying right away.

“Was it worth fighting about?” Gram asked Sammy.

“Yes,” he said, his voice fierce.

Dicey tried to figure out what could be so important to him. She wondered about it all that evening, not even listening to the arguments Sammy used to try to convince Gram that they should have some chickens. Until Sammy said something that caught her attention. “They're like watchdogs, Gram.”

Dicey sputtered, trying to swallow back her laughter. She was picturing chickens attacking a thief. Everybody was smiling, all around the table, and Sammy smiled the happiest of all. What did it matter then if he was getting into fights, or Maybeth never learned to read, or James pretended to be less smart than he was? Nothing mattered nearly as much as sitting together around this table, in the warm yellow light, all of them together.

That was true, she knew, but still she worried at the question of why Sammy was fighting. It couldn't be because of Momma, could it? In Provincetown, that was why, because of what people said about Momma and them. About not having a father living in the house with them, about not having their father's name. Nobody in Crisfield knew that, or even suspected, except maybe Millie. Then what would make Sammy fighting-angry?

She thought about it during school the next day. Maybe the kids were teasing Sammy about being a sissy, because he was so well-behaved in school. That would make him fight. Maybe something to do with Maybeth, so maybe Dicey should tell him about how James was teaching Maybeth and they thought James's way might be working.

When Miss Eversleigh gave them an in-class assignment, to take fifty dollars and plan meals for a family of four, Dicey didn't have to think twice about it. She remembered how they had eaten that summer, and how little money they had spent. Soup, peanut butter, bread, milk, bananas. She looked at her list and calculated expenses. Apples, she added. She still had almost thirty dollars left. She bet nobody else knew how to spend so little money and keep from starving. Around the edge of her paper she drew boxes of doughnuts, the kind of stale, half-price doughnuts they had bought over the summer. She drew a few clams and mussels. She didn't even notice Miss Eversleigh come to stand behind her and read what she had written, because she was trying to figure out how to draw chicken wings. They had had chicken wings once.

Dicey saw the arm come down over her shoulder and the red pen go to the top of her paper. The pen wrote:
F. Nobody could live for long on meals like this,
the pen wrote. The letters were straight and short, bright and thick and angry.

Dicey almost said, We did. But she stopped herself. She turned to look at the woman's face. Miss Eversleigh was certainly angry, and angry at Dicey. Neither of them said a word. Nobody else in the class even noticed.

Dicey didn't much care if Miss Eversleigh was angry. What more could she do than flunk Dicey, and she'd already done that. It wasn't as if she was teaching anything Dicey needed to know, or wanted to know. Who wanted to memorize food groups or talk about seasonal buying or how to store food while conserving energy. Who needed to know? Not Dicey. Or about how to put buttons on or cut out a pattern. That was for people who — didn't have anything more interesting to do. Dicey had much more interesting, and more important, things to do.

Miss Eversleigh stared into Dicey's eyes for a long time, as if trying to figure out what was going on inside her head. Dicey just stared back. It took more than a home ec teacher to scare her.

Finally, Miss Eversleigh went away to look at somebody else's paper, and Dicey got back to her thinking. If Sammy kept on fighting, then she would have to find out why. If he didn't, then it wasn't important. How many more fights would be keeping on? One, two, seven?

Miss Eversleigh stood at the front of the class again and called everybody to attention. She was going to make a speech, you could tell by the way her face was set, and she waited until every girl raised her face to look at the front of the room. Dicey shifted in her seat.

“I wonder if you girls understand,” Miss Eversleigh said, “the importance of this course. If it were not important, I would not waste my time teaching it.”

Dicey could hear the unspoken question behind each politely listening face: What's set her off?

“The materials we cover in this course are skills. I have spent years protesting the exclusion of boys from my courses.” She waited, then spoke again. “I have always believed that there is as great a disadvantage to not being able to perform domestic skills as to not being able to perform intellectual skills, or athletic, or social.”

Again she stopped and waited. Dicey was watching her, but Miss Eversleigh did not look at Dicey. “You owe it to yourselves to know how to prepare a meal, or sew a seam, or spend money wisely. You also owe it to yourselves to know how to hammer a nail straight or change a tire, to eat at table with appropriate manners, to plant tomatoes, to acquire information you have need of. If you do not understand that, your understanding is faulty.”

That was the end. Miss Eversleigh just stood there until the bell rang, a long, uncomfortable five minutes. Nobody stirred. Nobody said anything.