The Cape Ann (32 page)

After two hours our furious labors in the kitchen were done. Now Mama turned toward the living room, where Papa’s socks and underwear and shirts were draped over the furniture and strewn across the floor. Ashtrays overflowed. On the arm of the sofa, a brown wound about the size of a dime revealed pale stuffing.

It was twenty past four when we finished bringing order out of the chaos. Mama lay on the living room couch with a cold cloth on her forehead, a knife pain stabbing her from temple to temple. The drapes were drawn.

“Bring my purse,” she said. “It’s on the bureau.” From its varied
and sweet-smelling contents, she extracted two dimes. “Go get your nail polish. Don’t lose the change, and don’t dawdle.”

I dawdled a little. While the big clock above the prescription counter pulled the moments to it with a tick and pushed them away with a tock, and Mr. Eggers puttered, measuring and mixing, glancing up occasionally to make certain I wasn’t pouring Evening in Paris talcum into my palm or removing breast pumps from their boxes, I lingered before the Coty’s display, intoxicating myself with the potentiality of being beautiful and smelling of crushed peaches and sandalwood.

“Was there something you wanted?” the druggist inquired, calling from the chest-high space where he worked with the mortar and pestle.

“Fingernail polish. Pink.”

All the way home I caressed the little bottle, turning it upside down and right side up to observe the thick, lush flow of the enamel. In the kitchen I set the bottle on the table. “It’s called Precious Pink.”

“Put it on my bureau,” Mama told me, pouring mayonnaise dressing over macaroni and tuna salad, a favorite, hot-weather dinner of hers but one which Papa called “Fairy Salad.”

“Can’t we paint my nails now?”

“Do you see the time?” she asked, indicating the electric clock. It was five-thirty. “I told you not to dawdle. It’s almost supper time.”

“Did your headache go away?” I asked, setting the polish on Mama’s bureau beside her perfumes.

“No such luck.”

“Is it a migraine?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s a breast pump?” I asked, sitting down at the table. “They’ve got breast pumps at Eggers’s.”

Papa opened the screen door. “What difference is it to you what a breast pump is?”

“They’ve got them at Eggers’s.”

“They’ve got plenty of things at Eggers’s that are none of your business.”

Stirring the mayonnaise into the salad with a big spoon, Mama said, “A breast pump is something—”

“I said it was none of her business, Arlene,” Papa interrupted.

“There’s no reason the child shouldn’t know what a breast pump is.”

Papa closed the inner door and stood before it.

“It’s too hot to have the door closed,” Mama said. “I’ve got a headache. Please open it.”

“I don’t want the whole world hearing us arguing about breast pumps.”

“If you don’t argue, they won’t hear us,” Mama told him, crossing to the refrigerator. “Do you want iced tea?”

“You know I don’t drink that slop.” Ignoring Mama’s request that he open the door, Papa sat down at his place and, smiling, said, “Let’s not fight.”

Mama slammed the refrigerator door and set the cold tea pitcher on the table. Papa grabbed her wrist, pulling her down on his lap. “I’m glad you’re home. I missed you.”

“If you missed me so much, why didn’t you pick the place up before I got home?” Mama asked coldly.

“I was going to. I thought you were coming tomorrow,” he said.

“I told you when I was coming.”

Mama pulled away and went to fetch bread from the cupboard. “Lark and I worked from the time we got off the train till after four o’clock, cleaning up your mess.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I was going to clean it up. I’ve been so damned busy. Art’s been out sick two days this week. I’ve been running my ass off keeping up.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, it’s over ninety degrees.” She poured herself a glass of tea and put it to her temple. “Not the kind of weather when you want to come home and start scrubbing floors.”

“Why didn’t you leave it till later?” Papa asked.

Mama set her glass down hard on the table. “You’re making me crazy with your lying innocence,” she told Papa and hurried into the bedroom.

Papa sprang up and followed. “You’re calling me a liar?” he demanded.

Slipping down from the kitchen chair and passing behind Papa into the living room, I hunched myself into the corner of the couch.

“I’m working my tail off every day, getting by on hamburger every night, and you come home complaining and calling me a liar.”

“Your ma and pa are happy to have hamburger. How’d you get to be so special?” Mama wanted to know.

“You leave my ma and pa out of this, bitch.”

“All right, Willie, let’s just talk about
us,”
Mama shouted. “What about the four hundred and fifty dollars we don’t have that you lost at poker? Where are we going to get that?”

“I knew you’d come home screaming about that. I said to myself, ‘The first thing Arlene’s gonna do is throw that four hundred and fifty dollars up to me.’ And, by God, I was right.”

“Oh, no, you don’t, Willie. You’re not going to make me the villain.” Mama’s voice had the fuzzy sound it took on when she had a migraine. “I didn’t lose the money.”

“If we’ve got money to support your sister,” Papa spat at her, “we’ve got money for poker. And it’s none of your business how I pay my debts. I’ll take care of them my way.” He barged through the kitchen, knocking over Mama’s chair, and out the door, slamming it behind him.

I ran to the living room window and pulled the drape aside. Papa climbed into the pickup and drove away, spraying parking-lot gravel behind him. I guessed that he was going downtown to eat at the Loon Cafe, where Dora Noonan and Magdalen Haggerty would laugh at his jokes and serve him extra vanilla ice cream on his pie.

From the bedroom Mama’s voice was faint. “Lark,” she called.

I went to her.

“Put the macaroni in the refrigerator,” she told me.

“Mama, where’s our car?”

“What?”

“Where’s the Oldsmobile?”

“It’s not in the parking lot?” She opened her eyes to a slit to look at me.

I shook my head.

“My God,” she said.

“Where is it, Mama?”

“He’s sold it.”

•  •  •

I put the macaroni in the refrigerator, then tiptoed into the bedroom and removed the nail polish from Mama’s bureau. Sitting down at the kitchen table, I pushed aside a plate and studied my hands, examining the ragged nails, bitten back to the quick now. Opening the bottle of polish, I began to paint my fingers, nails and skin, up to the first knuckle. When I had finished, I poured the remaining polish on Papa’s chair and went to bed.

SEPTEMBER TOOK ME BY
surprise. When Mama said, “School starts next week,” I was dumbfounded.

Arithmetic and the Monkey Ward Christmas catalog were the best things about that autumn. Arithmetic I did not love for itself, but for what it symbolized: another giant step toward adulthood. I longed for third grade, when we would learn handwriting. Then I would have the basic skills to escape from childhood. I half imagined that someone would give me paid work when I could write longhand.

During kindergarten and first grade, I enjoyed playing “house” or “school” with my friends. Now I wanted to play “office” or “store” or, sometimes, “college,” although I didn’t know much about that. I could only predicate it by saying, “Imagine there are books
all
around. Books and books and books.” To which Beverly Ridza, if she were playing, would complain, “Godsakes, that sounds awful.”

I played with Beverly more in second grade than I had in first. Sally was still my best friend, but Beverly had taught me to swim. Now, when school let out at three, Sally and I and Beverly left together. Sally lived closest to school. I was next, and Beverly lived a block beyond Rayzeen’s Lumberyard in a one-room tar paper shack on the falling-down outskirts of town.

On Friday afternoons the three of us alternated stopping at Sally’s to study catechism or coming to my house. Mama saw at once that Beverly’s problem with catechism was poor reading. Out came the flash cards she’d made for me and new ones which she made up just for Beverly. Oddly enough, Beverly didn’t seem to
mind. She was flattered by the attention and time Mama gave her, especially as Mama did not patronize her or, worse, pity her. The truth was, however, that twice after Beverly left, Mama cried.

Now that I was in second grade, time seemed to evaporate. My seventh birthday, late in September, flew by before I knew what hit me. Lucky thing I had the new roller skates to remember it by. The fall bazaar at St. Boniface Catholic Church came and went with the same reckless haste.

The bazaar was held in the church basement in early November. As with the Knights of Columbus picnic, there were booths of baked goods and handiwork and white elephant objects. Games of skill, like ring toss; and games of chance, like bingo; and an enormous wheel of fortune were part of the festivities.

At the kitchen end of the room, folding tables were set up in a long row and for twenty-five cents you were served a plate heaped with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, Jell-O salad, and baked beans. When you got around all of that, there was pie or cake for dessert.

This year Mama let the girls in the catechism class serve the dessert. She made each of us a fancy apron like those she had sewn for the handiwork booth. Sally and I and Beverly, sporting our ruffled aprons, passed up and down the row of tables, carrying plates of dessert, serving from the left and clearing away from the right, and impressing even Sisters Mary Frances and Mary Clair despite themselves.

For the first time in years, Mrs. Stillman and Hilly did not attend the bazaar. Nor had Hilly come to the door at Halloween to see the children’s costumes. The day after the bazaar was Sunday. Following Mass, Mama and I went calling on the Stillmans with a pumpkin pie.

“We’ll tell her it’s left over from the bazaar,” said Mama, who had risen early that morning to bake it.

“Why?”

“So she won’t be embarrassed,” Mama explained.

Mama drove the pickup, and I sat beside her holding the pie. The day was gray and windswept, with grit and moldering leaves in the air, but the Stillman apartment was cozy.

“We can only stay a minute,” Mama told Mrs. Stillman, who insisted that we come in and take off our coats. “We have to get
home and start dinner.” That was true. We always sat down to Sunday dinner about two, and it was now nearly noon.

“I’ll call Hillyard,” Mrs. Stillman said. She turned at the door. “He’s in his pajamas and robe, I’m afraid. He doesn’t want to get dressed anymore. I hope you won’t mind.”

I had not seen Hilly since late September when we had taken him and Mrs. Stillman slices of my birthday cake. Hilly had misunderstood, thinking it was his birthday, so we all sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

I was startled now to see the difference a few weeks could make. His robe and pajamas hung on him. The insteps of his feet in the brown felt house slippers looked thin and bony, as did his wrists below the sleeves. Adding to the sorry picture was the condition of his robe, worn and laundered to the weight of a dish towel, and with elbows so threadbare, his pajamas sleeves poked through.

Curiosity flickered in Hilly’s eyes, then disappeared. Gone entirely was his old happiness at seeing me.

“Do you like pumpkin pie, Hilly?”

He roused himself and studied me.

“It’s Lark,” his mother told him.

“Lark?”

“That’s right.”

But I could see that he was still not sure.

“Lark and Mrs. Erhardt have brought us a delicious pumpkin pie. You know how you love pumpkin pie.” She seemed to draw from a bottomless well of patience.

Hilly smiled an unsure smile, his eyes darting from one of us to the other.

“Would you like me to come after school and read to you someday?” I asked.

“That would be very nice,” Mrs. Stillman said. “I think Hilly needs his friends right now.” She spoke of him as though he were not present, and indeed he seemed not to be.

“What’s wrong with Hilly?” I asked Mama when we were outside.

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe his sanity is coming back.”

“I don’t like him to be this way.”

Mama told me again the story of Hilly going to war and being decorated for bravery by two governments, of his being wounded
and sent home a shell-shocked hero no one wanted except his mother. “If Hilly’s getting well, we should be happy. It’s not his duty to be your playmate.”

BACK IN LATE JULY
, when Mama saw that I had chewed my nails down to raw flesh, she sat down and cried. And when Papa examined my hands, she told him, “If you take her to the cemetery, I’ll pack up our things, and Lark and I’ll go to my folks. You can sit here in your filth until hell freezes over.”

“You try that, lady, you just try that,” he said. “And you see how far you get.”

But he didn’t take me to the cemetery. The determination and passion he had invested in my fingernails because they were a symbol of my femininity, he now transferred to my catechetical scholarship, because it was a symbol of my piety. If I couldn’t be beautiful, I
could
be holy.

He began reviewing the catechism book with me, not asking what lesson we were studying, but opening it at random and questioning me in that fashion.

“But we haven’t had that lesson yet,” I told him when he asked, quoting from the book, “‘What is the judgment called which we have to undergo immediately after death?’” Looking up from the book, he said, “You should have read it all even if Sister didn’t assign it. Don’t you want to be smarter than the others?”

“I’m already smarter than the others.”

“We’re pretty stuck on ourselves, aren’t we?” He closed the book, keeping his index finger in the place where he’d read.

“I just meant, I always get a holy medal or a saint’s picture for knowing the lesson, that’s all. I’m the only one who’s gotten one every week. I’m
not
stuck on myself.”