True Colors (6 page)

Overhead, the Milky Way looked like a river flowing through the dark sky, and the stars hung so low and bright it seemed I could catch them on my tongue, like snow-flakes. I wrapped one of Hannah’s quilts around me and sat on the porch in the starlight, hoping to get a glimpse of the cat. I fell asleep without seeing her, but the bowl was empty in the morning.

chapter 7

Sundays were a day of rest, so in the summer, after chores and milking, and two long (and I mean
loooong
) hours of church and Sunday school, I’d always spent the whole afternoon with Nadine. Mostly we swam, but sometimes we wrote and put on plays, or took picnics up Black Hill, or rode Dolly and played cowboys and Indians. Sometimes we stopped by the town ball field and watched the old-timers play.

“I can’t believe you’re not allowed to play baseball or cards on Sunday,” Nadine said. “I’m glad I’m not a Presbyterian.”

I hated having to dress up for church (I was sure God wouldn’t mind if I wore my overalls, but Hannah didn’t see it that way), and it was awfully dull sitting through Reverend Miller’s sermons, but when Nadine described her church—first Communion, confession, and how she had to
give up her favorite things, like candy and ice cream, for Lent—well, I thought I was getting off easy being a Presbyterian. And the best thing about church was that the Wright brothers weren’t there. I figured even God would keel over if the Wright brothers ever showed up.

The old Nadine had liked baseball, even though she wasn’t very good at it, but the new Nadine acted as if it bored her, so I didn’t linger long at the ball field, even though I wanted to. I loved baseball. I was the best player at school, and always got picked captain when we were choosing teams, and Hannah and I listened to Red Sox games on the radio. Sometimes Nadine would toss a ball with me, but I mostly ended up chasing after it. Nadine threw, well, like a girl.

We could always count on Raleigh being at the ball field too, seeing as how both teams let him be their batboy, and like always, he came running over to me.

“Blue True,” he said.

“Why’s he call you that?” Nadine asked.

“I think he’s trying to say
true-blue
,” I answered. I hadn’t told her about the Wright brothers and the heron. “He’s just got it backward.”

Raleigh stood patting Dolly until Esther Green came by pushing her baby, Rodney, in his stroller to watch her husband play ball. Rodney was just about the homeliest thing I’d ever seen, but Esther seemed to like him.

Raleigh liked him, too. He liked all babies. He’d rush
over to pick up Rodney, cuddling and cooing and making faces to get Rodney to smile. The way Raleigh held Rodney reminded me of how he’d cradled that hurt heron.

Nadine wrinkled her nose.

“That Raleigh gives me the creeps,” she said. “I wouldn’t let him anywhere near
my
baby.”

I stared at her, too shocked to say anything. The old Nadine would never have said something so mean. Raleigh couldn’t help being the way he was.

When Rodney started to cry, Raleigh put him over his shoulder and jostled Rodney up and down, patting him gently on the bottom until he stopped crying.

I felt my eyes sting. Even Raleigh knew how to take care of a baby. Why hadn’t my own mama been able to do it?

“What’s the matter?” Nadine asked.

“Nothing,” I answered, blinking fast. “Let’s go.”

Besides me not being allowed to play baseball on Sundays, Nadine couldn’t believe that I didn’t get an allowance. I hadn’t even known what an allowance was until I’d met Nadine. Nadine didn’t have any chores, and she still got an allowance, and if Mrs. Tilton asked her to do a chore, Nadine could usually get out of it by faking being sick. Mrs. Tilton would ask her to pick up her socks, and Nadine would groan and say her stomach hurt “something terrible.” Mrs. Tilton would feel Nadine’s head, cluck “Poor baby” a few times, and make her some chamomile tea.

Hannah would never have fallen for that. I’d tried once, on a day when we were to have a vocabulary test, moaning and saying I felt sick. Hannah hadn’t said a word, just set the bottle of castor oil up on the cookstove to warm, and I’d scuttled off to school. I didn’t dread vocabulary tests nearly as much as I dreaded castor oil.

Nadine had her mother wrapped around her little finger, but she and her mom had fun, too, little things like making cookies and cupcakes, and big things like taking trips to Montreal to eat out, visit the botanical gardens, and shop for new dresses. I didn’t like cooking, and hated dresses with a passion, but I envied the time they spent together. Mrs. Tilton had invited me along once, last summer, but Hannah and I’d had hay to get in. I was hoping they’d invite me again this summer. I’d never been to Montreal. Nadine said everyone spoke French up there. If I went with them, I’d try out a little of the Quebecois French I’d learned from listening to the kids at school.

Nadine’s father could be really fun, too. Besides teaching us how to build a campfire, he’d taken us fishing (Nadine hated worms and cleaning fish, but I didn’t mind), showed us how to do jackknives and back dives off the raft, and even taught us Morse code. He taught us how to dance, too. Nadine and I were more interested in the jitterbug and swing than in slow dances (who wanted to hold hands and dance close with a boy, anyway?), but when I watched Nadine stand on her daddy’s feet while they waltzed around
the kitchen, I felt tears prickling my eyes and had to bite my lip. What would it be like to dance with
my
daddy? I wondered.

Some nights, when we were lying out under the stars, Nadine and I played “What’s your favorite thing?”

“Favorite food?” Nadine would ask.

It was always hard to pick just one.

“Sugar on snow,” I decided. “Green apples, too.”

Eating green apples always made Nadine’s mouth pucker up, and she didn’t like it that she wasn’t here in the spring when we were sugaring, so she’d never tasted sugar on snow.

“Well, mine is peach cobbler and pecan pie,” she said. She knew I’d never had those, either.

“Favorite smell?” I asked next.

“The ocean,” Nadine said.

I’d never been to the ocean, so I didn’t know it had a smell all its own.

“Mine is lilacs,” I said. “And fresh-cut hay.”

“My favorite
sound
is the ocean, too,” Nadine said.

“Mine is spring peepers,” I said. “And Canada geese. And cowbells.”

Hannah heard us one night and said her favorite sound was her grandfather playing the bagpipes. I wished I could have heard that, so that could be
my
favorite sound, too.

Somehow, I didn’t think the new Nadine would want to
play “What’s your favorite thing?” this summer, and if she did, I had a feeling her answers would be very different.

When I fed the cat that night, I wondered how she would answer if she could.

“What’s
your
favorite sound?” I asked her, then answered in a high voice.

“Mice squeaking,” I said.

The cat tilted her head to one side, listening.

“And what’s your favorite smell?” I asked her, answering again in the high voice.

“Mouse pie!” I said.

My bark of laughter scared her, and she dashed off.

“Well, if you didn’t want to play, you could have just said so,” I called after her.

I didn’t see Nadine again until Friday. With three days of dry weather, Hannah and I worked straight through haying. I didn’t even have time to go swimming, but Friday was raining, so I got to spend that whole day with Nadine. (Rain on the roof was one of my favorite sounds, too. I couldn’t have told you whether it was really the sound or because it meant that we couldn’t hay.)

She seemed like the old Nadine again (I’d come up with another idea to explain her two personalities—maybe Mr. Tilton was working on a secret government formula, and Nadine accidently drank some, and now she was two people in one, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and I thought
I’d better enjoy the old Nadine while I could. We played Chinese checkers and Monopoly, Old Maid, and Go Fish, and played every one of her records on the hand-cranked Victrola. Then we were out of things to do.

“Let’s go up in the attic,” I suggested. I loved snooping through boxes and trunks to see what treasures other people had in their attics.

Even the old Nadine was scared of attics and cellars (she hated mice, and spiders, and bugs of any kind), but she didn’t like to admit it, and since she couldn’t think of anything better to do, she shrugged and followed me up the stairs.

chapter 8

It was dark and dusty up there, like most attics, with boxes that mice had chewed into, a chair with a broken armrest, picture frames, and piles of crumbling books. We found an old trunk. Nadine tried to scare me by saying there might be a body in it, just like in
Arsenic and Old Lace
, but all we found was worn-out dresses and hats. They were faded and smelled musty, but we tried them on anyway, laughing at each other, and it felt like old times. At first, we pretended to be the crazy elderly aunts in
Arsenic and Old Lace
, then Nadine threw a feather boa around her neck and strutted across the attic like Bette Davis.

The lace around my collar was scratchy, and I tugged at it.

“Boy, I’m glad we don’t have to wear clothes like this anymore,” I said. I liked my frayed shirts and faded overalls.

Nadine didn’t say anything, but I could tell from the
way she twirled the skirts back and forth that she would have loved to wear clothes like that
all
the time.

We put the clothes back in the trunk and snooped in some of the boxes, but there wasn’t anything interesting in them, just Christmas ornaments and some old dishes wrapped in crumpled-up newspapers (I didn’t tell Nadine that the mice had made nests in them). We played with the spinning wheel, which made me think of a propeller on an airplane.

“Let’s play we’re paratroopers, dropped behind enemy lines,” I suggested, and I thought Nadine was going to go for it, but when she saw that meant crawling on our bellies across the dirty attic floor, she changed her mind.