The Cape Ann (17 page)

“Yes.”

I heard Mama getting milk from the refrigerator and cookies from the cupboard.

“What’s this thing called again?” Beverly asked.

“A typewriter,” Mama told her.

“What’re you doing with it?”

“Teaching myself to type.”

“Why?”

“So I’ll be ready for a job when one comes along.”

“You any good at it?”

“Not yet. I want to type fifty words a minute. I type about ten right now.”

“Think you’ll make it?”

“Yes, I will,” Mama told her.

Friday morning Mama drove to school to pick up my report card. “Mrs. Rath was sorry to hear that you were sick.” Mrs. Rath worked in the office.

“Is my report card good?” I asked from the crib, where I was coloring in the new coloring book.

“It’s fine.”

I put down the yellow crayon with which I’d been filling in the basking lion on page thirteen. Something must be wrong if the report card was only fine. Was it printing again? That was my bad subject. “Can I see it?” I had to absorb my failure through my own eyes, surrounding it wholly with my senses. If I imprinted it seriously on myself, like a tattoo, next year it would be a reminder to do better.

Mama handed me the card. Everything was A or Excellent, except for printing. The damned printing was A-minus. “Do we have to show Papa?”

“I’ll put it away. If he asks, I’ll show it to him. If he doesn’t, I won’t.” She slipped it into her top bureau drawer, under the hankies.

Papa thought I was fooling around if my marks weren’t straight A’s. “If you were doing what you’re supposed to, you’d have an A in printing,” he’d told me when I brought home my last report card with a B-plus in printing. “I’m going to tell your teacher to phone me up when you’re not doing what you’re supposed to.” I never knew if he told her or not. “I have ways of finding out when you’re bad,” Papa had told me more than once. “People tell me.”

“What people?”

“That’s for
me
to know.”

Maybe one of Papa’s spies would tell him that Mama had picked up my report card. I didn’t feel like coloring anymore, so I slipped into the garden in the clock and discovered a pair of roller skates beside the dutch door to the cottage. Strapping them on and tightening the clamps with the key, I flew down the tree-shaded street, breezes lifting my hair and whipping my skirt as I clicked along.

Mama brought me supper on a tray again. Vegetable soup and oyster crackers, and tea with honey. I listened carefully to the conversation in the kitchen, but Papa didn’t mention my report card. On Sunday, he said, he was going fishing with Mr. Navarin and Mr. Navarin’s son, Danny, who drove a truck for Sinclair. He talked about Mr. Navarin’s new outboard motor and how he wished he had one like it.

There had been a letter that day from Grandma Erhardt. Grandpa was laid up with a bad cold, she said. She hoped to see us all in July, if not before. This year’s garden was the best they’d ever put in, and she would have plenty of fresh vegetables by the time we came, including “the little yellow tomatoes Lark likes so much.”

Mama and Papa discussed a trip to New Frankfurt to visit Grandma and Grandpa. “After I get back from Betty’s,” Mama said. “With Lark sick now, that’s the soonest I can go.”

As Papa was preparing to return to the depot office, Mama told him that she was going to call on Mrs. Stillman to give Hilly our present. “Lark will be all right. If she needs anything, she’ll knock on the wall.”

“What present is that?” Papa wanted to know.

“Lark bought Hilly an ocarina at the white elephant booth.”

“What for?”

“Because he marched so well in the parade. Didn’t you notice?”

“He didn’t pee in his pants or fall down and foam at the mouth,” Papa said, laughing.

Before she left, Mama told me, “The potty and toilet paper are under the crib if you need to go before I’m back.”

“Can I write a note to Hilly?”

Mama got paper and pencil, and I wrote a letter, with some help in spelling.

It was A-plus printing, Mama said.

While Mama was out, I pored over the house plans, comparing each plan with the charming and suitable #127—The Cape Ann. There were always fresh details to be noted in the various designs—a particularly well-placed back hall closet or the clever way in which foundation plantings were used.

I’d got through only one of the booklets when Mama returned. “Hilly missed you,” she said, coming into the bedroom to give me a report. “He was hoping you’d come with your book. Mrs. Stillman says he talks about—what was it, something to do with pansies and a garden.”

“‘Peggy Among the Pansies.’ That’s the story I read him.”

“Well, evidently it pleased him. And you told him we were going to build a house, and he could come and pick flowers.” Mama handed me a picture torn roughly from a magazine. It was an advertisement for face soap. A woman was holding a bouquet of flowers to her face. “Hilly sent that to you.”

“Did he like the ocarina?”

“He started playing it right away. Mrs. Stillman had to send him into the bedroom so we could talk.”

“I wish we had our house so Hilly could come visit us and pick flowers. When do you think we’ll get the house?”

“As soon as I make some money. Then you and I are going to march over to Rayzeen’s Lumberyard and order our house.”

I pictured Mama and me, hand in hand, marching down dusty Fourth Street, our house plan in Mama’s purse.

“We’ll step right up to Mr. Rayzeen’s desk,” she continued, “and drop that house plan in front of him and say, ‘We want one of those, as soon as you’re able. And it had better be ready before the snow flies.’”

Mama shook down the thermometer. “Open,” she said, and put it under my tongue. “A hundred and two,” she read, removing it minutes later. “That’s too much.”

She brought aspirin, a jar of Vicks, and a piece of old, soft flannel. Next she carried in a bowl of cold water with ice cubes in it and set it on her bedside table.

“Do I have to have the cold rag, Mama?” My voice sounded awful, even to me.

This was one of Grandma Browning’s cures. First, you slathered a lot of Vicks on the sick person’s neck. Then you put an old cloth or towel in the ice water, wringing it out and wrapping it around the patient’s neck, over the Vicks. On top of the wet cloth you wound a dry towel and left it on over night. Although I hated it, I had to admit that it did seem to help.

When Mama had me all ready for the night, she began unloading the crib. There were house plan booklets,
Happy Stories for Bedtime
, Crayolas, and the coloring book Beverly had given me. A nagging little thought surfaced.

“How much did that coloring book cost, Mama?”

The price was printed on the upper, right-hand corner of the cover. “Twenty-five cents,” she told me.

“Is twenty-five cents a quarter?”

“Yes.”

Papa had given me a quarter, and I had bought three rides on the tilt-a-whirl for Beverly, so there hadn’t been twenty-five cents with my towel when she found it. Beverly never had any money of her own, so where had she got the extra? She had gone to some trouble to get me that present.

“When we have our house, can Beverly come and stay sometimes?”

“Yes.” Mama turned out the light. “No more talking.”

After our new house was built, Beverly and Sally could stay over whenever they wanted. The new house would be a place where Sally wouldn’t worry and Beverly could have a bath in a real tub. For that matter,
I
could have a bath in a real tub.

EXCEPT FOR A COUGH
that hung on, as it always did after tonsillitis, I was well by the time Mama and I left for Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan’s house on Monday, June 19. Dr. White said I could travel to Morgan Lake, but I couldn’t go swimming until the cough was gone.

Now that I knew how to swim, I wanted to be in the water, but there wouldn’t be time for swimming in Morgan Lake, even if the cough went away. I would be watching for the stork.

Papa wasn’t pleased that Mama and I were going to Aunt Betty’s. He hated baching. Seeing us off, he advised Mama, “If Betty’s putting on an act, you turn around and come home.”

Mama bridled. “Betty doesn’t put on acts,” she told Papa, and briskly climbed the stairs into the railway car.

We traveled by the eastbound passenger train, leaving Harvester at ten in the morning. Mama stayed up the night before until after two, baking for Papa and hand washing clothes she decided at the last minute she needed. I didn’t see how she could find excuses to wear so many outfits in a place like Morgan Lake, but Mama was clothes proud. At home she wore cotton housedresses with frilly collars and pockets and pretty buttons down the front, but when she went out, Mama wore the appropriate costume or what she had decided
ought
to be the appropriate costume. In the entire town of Harvester, maybe in the entire county of St. Bridget, Mama was the only woman who owned jodhpurs and English riding boots. Mama didn’t ride, but she liked to wear the pants and boots pheasant hunting. She was an excellent shot, and smart as money in her habit.

Occasionally Papa turned on Mama, ridiculing her for her wardrobe, but he liked to show her off. And Mama was a superior seamstress who stitched up many of her most unusual costumes herself. You couldn’t always count on Lundeen’s Dry Goods or even the Golden Rule in St. Paul. If you wanted trousers like Marlene Dietrich’s, you’d better be clever with a needle.

Mama also sewed for me. She’d made the dress I was wearing, a summery, poppy-sprigged dimity with smocking across the bodice. It was every bit as nice as what you could buy at Dayton’s in Minneapolis.

I did not want to muss my dress before Aunt Betty saw it, but I was drowsy. The smell of old, innocent dust in the red, plush upholstery; the strong-soap smell of the white linen antimacassar arranged over the tall seat back; the tipsy sway of the murmuring railway car; and the click-clack-clack, click-clack-clack of iron wheels on iron rails led me through the fuzzy curtains of sleep.

When I woke, my cheek against the upholstery was prickly. I had drooled a little from the corner of my mouth, a circumstance always embarrassing to me as I associated it with old, musty-smelling people like Grandma Browning’s Aunt Carrie from Marshalltown, Iowa. I wiped my moist cheek on the inside hem of my dress and picked the tiny grains of sleep from the comers of my eyes.

Mama, sitting opposite, was asleep, her head fallen against the closed window beside her. As with everything she did, Mama slept totally, without qualification or reserve. And sleep took her elsewhere, someplace far away, so that her body was uninhabited. When you shook her, she returned to you from a distant and unfamiliar place—California or Texas, maybe.

My own window was open. Hot, gritty air, laden with the perfume of coal smoke, bathed me—the happy, satisfying smell of going away. Down the aisle came the conductor. “Weed Lake,” he called, his voice drawing out the vowels and rising on “Lake.” He announced each stop as if it were an important place. I wondered, gazing out at the half dozen dusty, unpaved streets crisscrossing each other, the handful of barefaced little houses gathered indifferently around a general store-post office, what secrets, known to the conductor, colored his cry: “Weeeeed Laaaaake!”

The brakeman and conductor let the door close behind them as they stood in that noisy, shifting bridge between two cars, waiting for the train to grind to a halt.

I had to go to the toilet, but it was too late. We were nearly stopped, and it was forbidden to go to the toilet while the train was in the station. I crossed my legs. Weed Lake was always a long stop because our train, the eastbound train, was put onto a siding to await the arrival of the westbound train.

Two passengers alighted separately, the first a sturdy young man of twenty or so, wearing patched and much-mended gray gabardine trousers and a clean, white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. On his feet were heavy, brown work shoes, rough and cracked across the instep, but cleaned and polished. He was bareheaded, and the tops of his ears were burned the color of leather. His hair was cut very short, so that it would not soon again require barbering, and it was slicked down from a high, side part. Carrying an ancient and darkened crocodile valise as lightly as if it were a lunch pail, he swung down the aisle, ducking his head again and again to dart a glance out the windows, searching out a face expected or hoped for.

Heart skipping, I asked myself, could this be Earl Samson, come to marry the farm girl he’d left behind? But no, I reasoned, Earl would be older.

The second departing passenger was a stocky, heavy-moving woman about Mama’s age. Her body seemed unwilling to leave the train. She dragged her feet, forcing them toward the door. Above white anklets and oxfords, her featureless body was clothed in a starched, percale housedress whose once-bright flowers were faded to ghostly memories. Below the sleeves, her arms were muscled and red, and on the wrist of her right hand was a huge knot of flesh, hard as an enormous marble. Women developed these cysts during canning season. Grandma Browning always did. Usually they went away during the winter, when the paring and cutting of fruits and vegetables and the tightening of jar lids abated. Sometimes they didn’t.

The woman didn’t look out the train windows. She stared ahead, as though what awaited her were fatally familiar.

Would the once-pretty farm girl who had loved Earl Samson have grown old and colorless like this woman? Could this
be
that girl? I wouldn’t let myself consider it. I turned my gaze to the brick platform of the approaching depot. The depot agent waited, loose and sweaty, but with a flicker of excitement in his eyes at the oncoming engine. No matter that ten thousand engines had snorted and screeched and groaned to his door. A great steam engine, bearing down, was every time an experience that trembled through you, through your physical parts and through the other parts as well, shaking things up and rearranging them in unforeseeable ways.