Dicey's Song (8 page)

They had crabs for dinner and baked potatoes. Gram told the boys to empty every crab they had into the bushel basket, and by the size of the mound of cooked crabs on the center of the table, Dicey could tell that Gram shared her estimate of Mr. Lingerle's appetite. James looked at their guest once, and then kept his eyes off him. Sammy tried not to stare and didn't succeed. Maybeth, looking tiny next to him, kept up a kind of chatter about school. Sometimes, if Mr. Lingerle asked him a direct question, Sammy talked too. Mr. Lingerle seemed to know Sammy. Mr. Lingerle ate only four crabs after all, just like Dicey, and he picked out the littlest potato when the plate came to him, and he had only a couple of slices of tomato.

Finally, Sammy couldn't keep his mouth shut any longer. “You don't eat very much,” he accused the guest.

Mr. Lingerle flushed again. Dicey wondered about this, because he was entirely grown up and not even that young any more, not even a young grown-up. He took a deep breath and answered Sammy, and all the rest of them. “Let's just acknowledge that I'm fat.”

“Nobody said anything,” Gram snapped.

Mr. Lingerle drew back. “I just think it's better to say,” he apologized.

“Well, you're right,” she snapped. “On both counts.”

Dicey giggled. She thought her grandmother was pretty funny sometimes. Dicey enjoyed her grandmother, and the way her grandmother's mind worked. Mr. Lingerle gave Dicey a curious look, then he gave Gram a curious look, and his eyes became less wary. “You Tillermans certainly take some getting used to,” he remarked. “Maybeth has been surprise enough. I'm a simple man,” he said, with a smile that creased the flesh around his mouth. “I'm planning to relax and enjoy myself, unless you object?”

“We want you to,” Maybeth told him.

“
Did
you eat enough?” Sammy asked.

James tried to shush him, without success.

“Frankly, no. But here's what I'll do. When I get home, I'll stuff myself with something. I'm always nervous, the first time people meet me, and I'm never hungry when I'm nervous. Does that answer your question?”

“You count your blessings, young man,” Gram said to Sammy; but her eyes were twinkling.

“Yes, Gram,” he answered. “Next time I won't say anything.”

“Good.” Then Gram sent the little kids into the living room to do their homework. Dicey rolled up the crab shells in newspaper, washed and dried the dishes and glassware. She heard Mr. Lingerle ask Gram if Maybeth couldn't have two lessons a week instead of one. She heard Gram say no.

“Listen to me for a minute,” Mr. Lingerle pleaded. “I'm not saying Maybeth is a genius, or anything like it. But she
is
one of those people, one of those lucky people, who will always have music in their lives. People who can always find pleasure in music, no matter what else — hurts them, or goes wrong. I'd like to give her as much music as I can, because — because I want to. It's a pleasure for me. And then” — his chair creaked as he leaned forward — “when I hear what the other teachers say about her — and when I see how hard she works — at the piano she has success. Don't you want her to be successful, somewhere?”

“Of course, we do,” Gram snapped. Dicey, polishing plates dry, knew what was bothering Gram. Money. But Gram wasn't going to admit that. Dicey admired her pride, but she thought Gram was wrong not to tell Mr. Lingerle.

“I know what you're thinking, girl,” Gram said. Dicey came to stand beside her.

“I'm right,” Dicey said.

“You always think you're right,” Gram said.

Dicey just went back to the sink. She could have been finished five minutes ago, but she wanted to listen in.

Gram was silent, then said, “We don't have the money.”

“I wasn't asking for money,” Mr. Lingerle cried, exasperated. “Did I mention money?”

Dicey turned around to catch the end of Gram's quick smile. “If you can afford it,” Gram said.

“I can't afford not to,” Mr. Lingerle told her. “I guess you can't know — how exhilarating it is to teach someone like Maybeth. So, we're agreed?”

“Entirely,” Gram said.

Before he left, Mr. Lingerle played them all a couple of pieces on the piano. Then he asked them to sing for him, because Maybeth had told him they liked to sing, so they sang “Amazing Grace.” Mr. Lingerle joined in with a rich bass harmony. Gram asked them to sing “Who Will Sing for Me,” and they did. Then Sammy wanted to sing “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” When they had sung themselves out, Mr. Lingerle thanked them for a pleasant evening and left, getting himself, somehow, into a little Volkswagen that jounced off down the driveway, following its thin beams of light. They turned back to homework.

When Dicey was saying good night to Sammy, her brother said to her: “I didn't know he was like that.”

“Like what?”

“Nice.”

“What did you think he was like?”

“Funny.” Sammy rolled over and looked at her with hazel eyes. “The kids all laugh at him.”

“Because he's fat?”

He nodded.

“Do you?”

Sammy shrugged. “I've never been in trouble yet,” he said.

DICEY FINISHED her work apron the earliest of anyone in the home ec class. She spent the rest of the days assigned to this project pretending she still had work to do (so that Miss Eversleigh would keep off her back) and getting her other homework finished. On the day the project was due, Miss Eversleigh told every girl to put on her apron. Dicey stuck a marker in the story she was reading for English and jerked her apron over her head. She sat down again and opened her book.

But everybody had to stand up. Dicey wasn't sorry she'd done as bad a job as she'd done, but she wished she didn't have to stand up so everybody else could see. She made her face stony.

There was silence for a few minutes, while everybody looked at what everybody else had made (everybody except Dicey, who kept on reading), and Miss Eversleigh went around to everyone, like a general reviewing the troops, Dicey thought, acting as if the aprons mattered. When the first ripple of laughter began, Dicey looked up.

They were looking at her, at her apron. Well, she knew the hem rippled up and down, and the neckband pulled one side of the bib up to her shoulder, and the two big red buttons she'd used for decoration on the bib sat at just the wrong places. She knew that and she didn't care. She glared at the laughing faces, her chin high. Wilhemina was trying not to laugh, but her cheeks puffed out with holding it in, and her eyes glistened. Dicey just stared at her. The only other angry person in the room was Miss Eversleigh, and she was staring anger at Dicey. Dicey was thinking of what to say, and she kept her chin up high like Gram's, when the bell rang. Ending class.

Dicey whipped her apron up over her head and rolled it into a ball. She grabbed her books, fast, because Miss Eversleigh was moving toward her. She rushed out of the room, slamming the apron into the trash basket by the door.

In the hall she collided with Mina. “What do
you
want,” she demanded.

“It
was
funny-looking,” Mina said.

“I wanted to take mechanical drawing,” Dicey said. “If I were a boy, they'd have found room for me in that class.” She heard the anger in her own voice.

“Don't take it out on me,” Mina said, angry herself now. “Boy. I thought I could count on you not to be — ordinary.”

“I never asked you to count on me for anything,” Dicey said. She stormed down the hall, riding the waves of her own anger. At least it was Friday and she wouldn't have to go to school again until two days later.

When Dicey got home on Fridays, she usually had the house to herself for a few minutes. Gram picked Sammy up at school, and they did grocery shopping before returning together in the outboard. James was off delivering papers. Maybeth had her second piano lesson on Fridays.

Dicey slammed around the house, taking her books up to her room, pouring a glass of milk. She swept out the downstairs with quick strokes of the broom. She began to feel all right again. She was about to go out to the barn and get down to work, when Sammy and Gram arrived; so she went down through the marsh to the boat, to get the last bags of groceries.

“We're having steak tonight,” Sammy announced. “Gram got it.”

“Got the steak, and a check from Welfare,” Gram said. Her mouth was tight. “They paid us everything from the time we first filed. So I thought — something to celebrate. If it deserves celebration.”

Gram didn't like taking charity, Dicey knew that because Gram said so. For that matter, neither did she. But Gram had said, when she finally agreed to take them in, that that might be what they had to do.

“I must say,” Gram said, moving from table to refrigerator, “I've never gotten money back on taxes before. It ought to feel good.”

Dicey finished the sentence for her: But it doesn't. She felt like she ought to apologize to Gram. After all, it had been her idea to come down here and see if they could stay. The words
I'm sorry
started to form themselves on her lips. But nobody made Gram do things. If she didn't want the children, all she had to do was say so.

“Steak'll be good,” was all Dicey said.

“It better be,” Gram answered.

“I wanna play catch,” Sammy said. “Dicey?”

She shook her head.

“Please?”

“James'Il be home in a while. Ask him.”

“Gram? Will you?”

“Not today.” Gram was slamming around the kitchen. Dicey guessed she knew about how her grandmother felt.

“I'm gonna go meet James,” Sammy decided. He ran out the door, letting it slam behind him. Gram had taken off her shoes and was putting eggs and butter out on the table. She hauled down her big mixing bowl. “What are you making?” Dicey asked.

“Chocolate cake and I don't want any help, nor need it,” Gram said.

The last time they had Gram's chocolate cake was for Sammy's birthday; but then Gram seemed happy about making it.

Dicey went out to the barn. While she scraped, she thought about the English assignment. She'd show them she could write something good. She began thinking of how she would write about Momma, how to say enough for it to tell what had happened, but not as if she was talking about her own mother. After a while, she put down the scraper and went upstairs to the desk in her bedroom. She had thought of a way to begin that would give her a good ending too. She began to write.

Downstairs, she heard the boys come in, with raised voices as if they were quarreling. Vaguely, she wondered what they could be quarreling about. Gram would settle it. Dicey continued writing, until a question that had been hovering around the back of her head, away behind her ideas, sneaked around to the front: wasn't Maybeth supposed to be home by now?

Outside, the sun was going down. Time to get to the kitchen, probably past time. Clouds crowded the sky, heavy and dark. The marsh lay under a pale mist, and in the distance, the Bay was dark purple.

lames and Sammy sat over a game of checkers. Dicey said hello before turning down the hall to the kitchen. “I'd steer clear,” James advised her. “Something's eating Gram.”

“She got a welfare check today,” Dicey explained.

“I don't know,” James said.

Gram had set the table and put out glasses on the counter. She had put potatoes into the oven to bake. She had a stick of butter ready on the table. The cake she had made stood on the sideboard, tall and frosted. The steak waited beside a huge iron frying pan, beside the stove. Gram sat at the head of the table, in her usual place. Under the yellow kitchen light, her face looked pale and tired.

“And what do
you
want?” Gram demanded.

“I was going to set the table,” Dicey said. Why was Gram angry at her? “Where's Maybeth?”

“Late,” Gram said. Her face closed off.

“What were Sammy and James fighting about?” Dicey asked.

“The place of a perfectionist in this world,” Gram said. Whatever that meant. “Ask 'em yourself.”

Dicey went back down to the living room. “What
were
you two quarreling about?” she demanded.

“Are you angry?” Sammy asked. “Why is everyone angry at me?”

“Nothing really,” James told her. His hazel eyes were worried. “We shouldn't have bothered Gram. Sammy just said I wasn't being careful where I threw the papers, it wasn't even important.”

“Were you?” Dicey asked him.

James shook his head.

“I told him,” Sammy said.

“Do you think something's happened to Maybeth?” James asked.

“What could happen to Maybeth,” Dicey said to soothe him. But, of course, anything could happen to Maybeth, or any of them, or anyone. James was too smart to be fooled about that, but he let himself believe her. She could see in his eyes how he was making himself believe her, and her tone of voice.