The Luckiest Girl (4 page)

“Go on, all of you, and wash up for supper,” ordered Mavis. “It's such a warm day we'll eat out under the pergola.”

Pergola
was such an old-fashioned word. Shelley had thought everyone in California had a patio.

“Katie, you slice the French bread and carry it out to the table,” directed Mavis.

As she opened the bread box, Katie heaved a noisy, exhausted sigh, as if slicing bread were a terrible chore.

“It's just a phase,” said Mavis grimly.

“Mommy, do you have to go around saying everything I do is just a phase all the time?” asked Katie.

Mavis laughed. “I certainly hope it is just a phase,” she said. “I would hate to think that some of your behavior was permanent.”

Katie picked a leaf of curly chicory out of the salad, held it up beside her face as if it were a lock of hair, and remarked, “I wish I had curly hair.”

Mavis stirred sour cream into the bubbling casserole before she ladled the Stroganoff over rice. The meal was served on trays, and Shelley noticed that there was a fresh cloth napkin on each tray. She would have expected such a casual family to use paper napkins.

The Michies carried their trays out through the dining room to a table under the pergola, which Shelley saw was a sort of arbor supported by pillars and covered with vines. As she joined the family at the long table, she was aware of a lovely
fragrance. “Why, there are lemons growing on that tree and blossoms, too!” she exclaimed when she had discovered the source of the fragrance. Real lemons growing in the garden!

Everyone laughed. “Haven't you ever seen lemons before?” asked Katie.

“Not growing,” answered Shelley. “Why, there are green lemons and ripe lemons and blossoms on the tree all at the same time!” Nature in California must be in a state of utter confusion to produce such a tree as this.

While the others were discussing lemons, Katie left the table and walked across the yard to a tree with a gnarled trunk and slender gray foliage. She picked something, which she laid on the table in front of Shelley. “We have olives growing in the yard, too,” she said.

“Fresh olives right off the tree!” marveled Shelley. How kind of Katie to offer her one. “I simply adore olives.”

“Oh, Shelley—” began Mavis.

It was too late. Shelley bit eagerly into the olive. The taste was so bitter and so terrible that she could not believe it. She sat shocked, not knowing what to do.

Katie went into a fit of giggles.

“Oh, Shelley, I am so sorry,” said Mavis. “I tried to warn you.”

Shelley swallowed and gulped from her water glass while Katie continued to giggle.

Then Tom spoke. “Katie, that was not a nice thing to do. I think you should apologize to Shelley.”

Katie tried to look repentant but did not succeed.

“I'm sorry,” she said, giggling, “but you looked so surprised when you bit into the olive.”

Shelley was so embarrassed she did not know how to answer. Apparently Katie had made her the victim of a practical joke. And just when she was beginning to feel at ease, too.

“All olives are bitter until they have been cured,” Tom explained. “Katie was counting on your not knowing that.”

“She certainly caught me,” said Shelley, managing to smile to show she was a good sport, even though she did not feel like one. If this was part of Katie's difficult age, she did not like to think what the rest of the winter could be like. “It tasted so awful I don't see how anyone ever thought of eating them in the first place.”

“You know, that is exactly what I have always
wondered,” said Katie, smiling warmly at Shelley for the first time, as if now they had something in common. “Well, I guess I had better go do my practicing.”

“Mother, she's just trying to get out of the dishes,” protested Luke. “She always gets out of the dishes.”

“I have to practice, don't I?” asked Katie virtuously as she rose from the table.

“Yes, you do,” agreed Mavis, “but that doesn't mean you get out of the dishes.”

Katie heaved a sigh that showed she was exhausted, abused, and misunderstood by her family. Then she disappeared into the house, and chords crashed out of the piano in the living room.

When Katie settled down to play, Shelley thought she played surprisingly well for a girl of thirteen. The music she recognized as Liszt's
Second Hungarian Rhapsody
, but while she listened, the rhapsody turned suddenly and logically into
Pop Goes the Weasel
.

“Katie!” yelled Tom in a voice that would have carried across a gymnasium full of shouting boys.

The music stopped. “But Daddy,” protested Katie. “It fits there. See, the music goes like this”—she demonstrated with a few notes—“and
then it just naturally wants to turn into
Pop Goes the Weasel
. Like this.”

“You stick to the notes as they are written,” ordered Tom.

Mavis sighed. “She has talent, but she simply doesn't care.”

Katie finished playing
Pop Goes the Weasel
. The rest of the family continued to sit under the pergola while darkness fell.

Shelley peered at her watch. “It is getting dark awfully early,” she observed.

“That's because you are farther south. A thousand miles makes a big difference in the time darkness falls,” Tom explained.

Why, I knew that, Shelley thought suddenly, but the information had never seemed real before, any more than igloos or the international date line or a lot of other things in schoolbooks seemed real. Until now this had been a fact to be learned, stored away, and pulled out again to be put down on a test paper if that question happened to be asked. Now she had really traveled, had seen before her eyes the things she had learned about in school.

Suddenly Tom rose to his feet. “There's a full moon,” he announced. “Let's do the washing.”

For a moment Shelley thought she must have
misunderstood, but Mavis said matter-of-factly, “That's a wonderful idea. I'll gather up the laundry.”

Shelley was not sure how she should react, so she offered to wash the dishes. Willing dishwashers, she knew, were always welcome. When in doubt, wash the dishes should be a good rule to follow when living in a strange household.

The Michies carried their trays into the kitchen, where Shelley began to scrape and stack the plates. From the sink she could look into the laundry, a room with a sloping roof that looked as if it had been added to the house as an afterthought. The room was equipped with an automatic washing machine, a pair of laundry tubs, an old washing machine with a wringer, two ironing boards, and a mangle so large it must have belonged to a professional laundry at one time. On the wall over the mangle was the mounted head of a deer with several old hats hung jauntily on its antlers.

While Shelley washed and wiped the dishes, Mavis sorted piles of towels, sheets, and clothing. Luke loaded the automatic washer while Tom put colored clothing through the second washing machine. They all appeared to be enjoying themselves. From the living room came the first notes of the rhapsody.

“Katie's starting that piece again just to get out of helping,” remarked Luke.

Beneath her feet Shelley could feel the old house shake from the vibration of the automatic washer. A frightened mouse ran out from under a cupboard and stared at Shelley, with its whiskers quivering, before it disappeared under the refrigerator. Shelley, who had never lived in a house with mice before, did not feel surprised. A little gray mouse seemed a perfectly natural member of this household.

When Shelley had wrung out the dishcloth and hung it over the faucet, she went into the laundry. “May I help?” she asked.

“You're just in time,” answered Tom, piling clean wet clothes into a clothes basket on a child's wagon. “You and Luke can start hanging these out.”

Luke pulled the wagon out into the backyard under the clotheslines. Shelley followed, thinking how strange it was to be living in the same house with a boy so near her own age and how much stranger to be hanging out laundry with him. She picked up a clothespin and began to pin a towel to the line. The moonlight, even filtered through the eucalyptus trees, was so bright that she could read the words
Vincente Junior College
printed in a
green stripe down the center of the towel. The eucalyptus trees gave off a medicinal odor something like cough drops, which mingled with the sweetness of the lemon blossoms.

“I understand you are working on a motorcycle,” said Shelley, wanting to start a conversation with this quiet boy.

“Yes.” Luke sounded pleased at her interest. “It keeps me broke buying parts, but I think I can get it running sometime.”

“Won't it worry your mother to have you riding around on a motorcycle?” Shelley asked.

“I guess so.” Luke sounded discouraged, as if he had been losing an argument for a long time.

Shelley wished she had not mentioned his mother.

Tom, followed by Mavis, carried out a second basket of laundry, which they began to hang. Shelley, who had a towel with
St. Joseph's High School
stitched in one corner, remarked, “You certainly have a lot of towels.”

Mavis laughed. “I suppose our towels look odd to you. You see, visiting teams playing at the high school bring their own towels with them and they usually leave one or two behind. Tom started bringing them home when he discovered the janitors
only threw them away. Tom never wants anything to be wasted.”

“We use towels for everything—dusting, mopping up whatever gets spilled, wiping the dog's muddy feet,” said Tom.

The moon, rising above the eucalyptus trees, shone even brighter. I wonder where the moon is in the sky at home, Shelley wondered as she picked up another towel and clothespin; but no matter where it was, she was sure that no one else was hanging out a washing by its light. It seemed too bad when she thought about it. It was such a lovely way to hang out a washing. Shelley pulled the last towel out of the basket, and as she pinned it to the line she decided that if it were not for Katie, she would like living here. So far she enjoyed the customs of the natives. Tom was friendly, Mavis comfortable, Luke shy and quiet, but Katie…Shelley could not bring herself to like Katie wholeheartedly. And she not only had nine months of Katie's company ahead of her, but she was supposed to be a good experience for her, which probably meant to be a good example.

From inside the house came the frisking notes of
Pop Goes the Weasel
.

“Katie!” shouted Tom.
Pop Goes the Weasel
turned into the rhapsody.

Later that evening after she had unpacked her trunk and taken her turn at the towel-filled bathroom, Shelley was sitting on her bed in her pajamas, putting her hair up in pin curls. The edge of the India print spread was not even hemmed, she noticed. She was thinking that at home everything was hemmed when she heard a knock at her door.

“Come in,” she said.

Katie entered. She was wearing a full red-and-white printed skirt and a white blouse with little buttons like strawberries down the front. In her hand she carried a half-eaten banana. She twirled around so that the skirt stood out. “See my dress for the first day of school!” she said, and her face shone with pleasure. “Mommy bought it for me and I wasn't even hounding her.” She sank down on the bed beside Shelley and took a big bite of banana. “You know something?” she said, sounding wistful even though her mouth was full. “I wish my hair looked nice like yours.”

“Why, thank you,” answered Shelley, pleased by this compliment.

“Do you have a permanent?” asked Katie.

“No, my hair is curly if I coax it,” replied Shelley. “It may take a lot of coaxing here, because the air is so dry.”

“Do you have lots of boyfriends at home?” asked Katie bluntly.

“Not lots.” Katie's admiration made her feel attractive and popular, a pleasant feeling for any girl to experience.

“I wish Mommy would let me have a permanent,” said Katie wistfully, running her hand through her straight dark hair. “Pamela—she's my best friend—has permanents all the time. If I ever have a daughter my age I'll let her have all the permanents she wants.”

That sounds familiar, thought Shelley with a twinge of amusement. She wondered if Katie kept a list.

“Katie!” Tom's voice rang out. “Bedtime!”

“Yes, Daddy,” answered Katie in her exhausted voice. She stuffed the rest of the banana into her mouth. “Night, Shelley,” she said, her voice muffled. “And I really am sorry about the olive. I just couldn't resist it.”

“Oh, well, I guess everyone has to be a greenhorn or tenderfoot or something sometime,”
answered Shelley, this time forgiving Katie. When Katie had gone, she turned off the light and slipped into bed. She lay enjoying the fragrance of the lemon blossoms below her window and listening to the strange night sounds—the rustle of eucalyptus leaves, the dry rattle of palm fronds, the sound of tires on the road, the friendly creaks of an old house settling for the night, and in the distance the
blat-blat
of a diesel train. Where were the lonesome whistles, the
a-hooey
,
a-hooey
of song writers, Shelley wondered. Nobody wrote songs about the
blat-blat
of a diesel train, but then it wasn't a lonely sound.

Shelley smiled in the darkness, her uneasiness about living with a strange family now completely banished. The only thing wrong with Katie was her age. She was thirteen years old. Now that Shelley understood this, she knew that everything was going to be all right after all. She was going to like living in a house with a cat in a hamper and mice in the kitchen and a family that hung out the washing by the light of the moon.

But tomorrow was the first day of school….