by Minrose Gwin
Throughout all this, Dad looks down at the trunk. Then he looks up at June, who’s grinning from ear to ear. His shoulders slump. He grabs the trunk and lifts it up and carries it into the house.
Frances comes in, puts down her purse on the kitchen counter. Dad already has some sickly pink weiners boiling on the stove. She pours them out into the sink, runs cold water on them, and dumps them into the garbage. “All right, girls,” she says. “Let’s get some supper on the table.”
June and I jump into action. We love the way Frances keeps us moving along in time. Her favorite command is “sally forth.” “Come on, my dears,” she’d say, “let’s sally forth to the Piggly Wiggly. Quickly now: chop, chop.” As the days unfold toward Christmas and the year’s end, the weather turning cold and dreary and wet, she worries about the length and tidiness of our hair, the mud on our shoes. She makes dental appointments for us. She shows us how to file our fingernails one way only so they don’t break and snag our sweaters. She shops, she cleans, she bleaches our white blouses, she writes thank-you notes for the potato salads and hams and Jell-O molds brought by sly-eyed people after our mother’s death.
One afternoon she shows up with a perm and Mango Tango fingernails. She starts wearing rouge at breakfast. She hums under her breath, makes sandwiches for Saturday picnics in the frigid backyard, makes Dad get us a badminton set and put up a net. We need to exercise more, blood flow is important for young girls. She asks for sips of his cherry bounce. She feeds the squirrels vegetable scraps.
The more she bustles about, the more Dad hides behind his newspaper. On weekends he goes to the office.
A week before Christmas she surprises us with a tree. When June and I troop in from school that afternoon, the radio is blaring “Silent Night.” She’s put on three strands of star lights that twinkle, one red, one green, and one multicolored. She has brought our ornaments up from the basement and tells us to decorate the tree. We cry a little while we do this. Our mother was particular about her tree; she would sit on the sofa squinting and turning her head from side to side to get a better view. Then she would say, “You, Grace, move the star down and to the left. No, not there. There.”
While we’re decorating the tree, Frances mixes up a batch of sugar cookies, gets out the cutters she’s bought in the shapes of Christmas trees and stars, and calls us into the kitchen to roll out the dough, cut our shapes, and sprinkle them with glitter and Red Hots.
That night Dad comes home to a house that smells of sugar and pine. He sniffs the air, glances at the tree, and heads into the kitchen. The cookies, lined up on waxed paper on the kitchen counter, are still warm. Frances pulls Mama’s apron over her head and fluffs her hair. “Have a cookie, Holly,” she says.
Dad doesn’t even take off his coat. “We appreciate your help, Frances, but we need to be on our own now. We need to settle down.”
“But, Holly,” she says in a happy rush, “I’m just so glad to help out. Maybe I can get a job teaching in Opelika, move down here. You need a woman’s touch around this place, someone to watch after these girls. You need a substitute!” It’s a dumb schoolteacherish joke.
Dad is in the process of taking off his coat when she says it. He makes an explosive sound in his throat, something between a bark and a growl.
Frances catches her breath, her face flushed and sweaty, the rouge on her cheeks sloughing its way down her cheeks. “Oh, I didn’t mean . . .” She puts a hand to her cheek. She’s just put the dumplings into the pot; they haven’t floated on the broth the way they’re supposed to, the way our mother’s would have done, but have belly-upped and drowned, sinking to the bottom of the pot. She begins to scrape them up with a spatula, slimy and flattened and burnt.
Dad clears his throat. “A substitute isn’t the real thing.”
Frances scrapes harder, her back turned to him. “Sometimes a substitute is better than nothing. Sometimes a person has to think of others.”
Dad rubs his mouth. “It’s not that, Frances, it’s just . . .”
“Don’t say it.” Frances looks over at June and me, frozen in the task of setting the table, knives and forks in our hands. “Girls, get out the placemats first.”
That night it is my turn to sleep with Frances. She always reads before turning out the light, books with titles like By Love Possessed and Compulsion, but tonight she turns off the light as soon as she returns from the bathroom in her nightgown.
In the night I awake to her tossing and turning. In the moonlight I can see that her face is wet, her nearsighted eyes glazed. “Oh, Grace,” she cries out, “whatever is going to become of us?” Her question explodes in the room; pieces of it hover in the cold, still air.
I bury my face in the pillow and start to cry too. Frances puts her hand on my shoulder and I cry harder. “Don’t listen to me,” she says. “Everything will work out. It will be all right.” She moves in closer, her arm pinning me down. I throw off her arm and bolt out of the bed, pulling my pillow with me. “Don’t go,” she says, but I head down the hall for June’s room and crawl into her bed, molding myself to her back as she sleeps.
The next morning when June and I get up, Dad is out in the backyard digging. He has staked out an area the size of our kitchen with sticks and twine and has a determined look on his face. We go out in our pajamas and sidle up beside him. A wind has come up, biting our faces, rattling the mimosa branches. When we ask our father what he’s up to, he tells us he’s building a bomb shelter. There’s a booklet lying on the ground that has a picture on the cover of a mother and father and a boy and girl with smug little smiles on their faces playing cards in a room with shelves and cans and beds that hang from the ceiling. The cover reads: “If You Can Build a Birdhouse, You Can Build a Bomb Shelter. Do-It-Yourself Shelter, Fallout Protection for Four. $150.”
Frances calls June and me in for breakfast, scolding us for going out in the cold in our pajamas. She ignores Dad and his pile of dirt. She has set the table for three and placed a stack of hotcakes on each of our plates. The hotcakes are runny inside and burnt outside, but we don’t say a word, just eat them with some old sorghum molasses Mama bought from a stand on the side of the road. We carry the dishes to the sink and thank Frances for breakfast, hoping to counter Dad’s rudeness with appreciation and obedience. We stand behind her with dish towels to dry as she runs the water for the dishes, her back to us.
“Frances, please stay,” I say. “Dad was just talking.”
She scrubs hard on the skillet. “I can’t, honey. You girls can come into the City on the bus when you get a little older. We can go out to the lake and get some shrimp. Go to the zoo.”
The thought of the zoo knocks the breath out of me. When did my mother die? I want to know the hour, the minute, the second. Was it while June and I stood in front of the polar bear exhibit? Was it when that awful man was taking our picture?
Frances finishes the dishes and heads back to my room. June follows her and sits on the bed while our aunt gathers up her things: a pot of cold cream, her nightgown hanging on the hook on the inside of the door, her comb and brush. “Well, girls,” she says. She touches first June and then me on the tops of our heads, then picks up her overnight bag and heads out the door. Her red trunk is already on the back seat of the car. We follow at her heels, as if we are one girl rather than two. When she gets in the car, we cluster at her window, as she fumbles with her key. We stand in the driveway as she backs her car out. We wave, but she doesn’t look back.
We stand in the driveway a while, as if we are waiting for her to drive around the block and return. June kicks dead leaves and hums like a trapped fly. I start to shiver. A squirrel approaches us from across the yard, then scurries away, disappointed.
“Damn that Frances,” says my sister.
“Damn her hide,” I say.
7
Holly
IN THOSE FIRST WEEKS AFTER, OLIVIA WOULD COME TO ME in dreams, the mesh bag she’d used to catch that sparrow hanging loose in her hand.
My boy in that bag, his sweet flesh smooth and curved like an egg.
When the police came to the house, I had to tell the girls the truth, what Olivia had gone and done, how there would be an inquest, then a trial. I’d found the address and phone number in her purse. That night I wanted to go out there and kill him myself, butcher him like a hog, the way he’d butchered her and my boy. (It was a boy. I made sure to ask.)
But I had me a mess to clean up. I stayed up all night scrubbing the floor, throwing her gowns, the bloody towels out in the trash. There was so much blood. The next morning I called Routledge’s and ordered a new bed, told them to bring it right out and be prepared to dispose of mine. Word had spread, and Jack Routledge had the bed to me by noon. His men turned our marriage bed upside down before carrying it off, so we didn’t have to see the blood.
In the days that followed, the girls wouldn’t let me out of their sight, following me from room to room. After the burial, I made them go back to school, take up their lives. They were good girls, they did what I said, but it was like they were sleepwalking. June would forget to comb her hair. Grace’s socks never matched. At first people brought food, people I’d never seen in my life. When that ran out, I opened cans that Olivia had stockpiled in the pantry, hardly knowing what was in them. At the table I’d pick up my paper and hide behind it, just to shield myself from June’s hunched shoulders, Grace’s shell-shocked eyes.
I could not bring myself to look at Grace. Those two hours, what difference would they have made? I never asked the time of death, didn’t want to know. And, really, the fault is mine: I shouldn’t have left that day. I should have stayed home with Olivia. I should have made her go to the hospital, even if I had to drag her by the hair of the head. Not to speak of the other thing I did.
Still, I could not look at my eldest daughter.
Then the teachers started calling. They knew we were going through a terrible time, but I should know that June was sleeping in class, not eating her lunch, failing recent tests in English and geography. Was she bathing regularly? Did I know she was wearing the same outfit every day? Grace had kept up with her studies, but had a bad attitude, refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, getting into squabbles in the halls.
One night, Grace left the supper table without eating. June burst into tears and clawed at my newspaper and started raving about hot dogs, how much she hated them. When I got her to bed, I went into my room and called Frances. I just wanted to ask her advice. She was a teacher, she ought to know something about girls. She said she’d come on Friday and stay the weekend and sort things out. It was the last thing I wanted, her in my house, like some strange mutation of Olivia, but I was crawling through a dark tunnel, no end in sight, pulling the girls along behind me, all of us in danger of being buried alive. I choked on the phone trying to say thank you, making a fool of myself.
WE WENT ALONG for a while, me and the girls and Frances. After a while, Frances said Grace and June needed her full time. They needed supervision and structure, they needed haircuts and new shoes. She got them to whispering and giggling again, mostly about her cooking and her bossy ways. She got them dressed properly in the morning and made them sit down and do their homework. She took them to church and the dentist. When Grace started her monthlies, Frances got her set up and told me about it afterward.
Then Frances started drinking my cherry bounce and asking what we were going to do in six months, a year. She started looking at me. Then she brought in that Christmas tree.
The night after I asked her to go and she left in a huff, I put down the newspaper and studied my girls across the table. The skin on their faces was smooth as cream, their fingers long and tapered like Olivia’s. I thought back to when they were crawling babies, how they would wait for me to get home at night and scoot across the floor on their hands and knees, crowing to be picked up and tossed in the air.
Now, their eyes looked past mine like they were looking at someone standing behind my chair, a stranger.
June kicked at the table leg while she ate, her hair falling in her face, her shoulders hunched. She reminded me of a picture I’d seen of a Jap kid. He wasn’t wearing anything but this torn nightshirt and he was covered in black splotches, radiation burns. He crouched low, peering up into the night sky like he was waiting for the next Bomb to fall.
I forced myself to look at Grace. Her cheek was still round as a little child’s, her shoulders bony, her upper arms sticks.
She looked back at me then, her eyes, gray like Olivia’s, clouded over, empty and dull as dishwater.
I am an accountant. Two hours is two hours, not an everlasting bill due.
Once I had been a father. Once I had tucked my girls in at night, had taken them to see the giraffes dance.
I had read about the Bomb. What it could do. The fallout they call black rain. I had seen the pictures, eyes staring out from bandages, the open sores.
My dad told me the first thing a man does is take care of his family, protect his family. When he signed me up for Scouts, he gave me the Handbook for Boys with the cover I loved. It had an Indian chief in a feathered headdress, naked as a jaybird. He stood over a campfire where boys like me sat cross-legged in their summer uniforms with the red neck scarves. He guarded us boys, teaching us the old ways of the woods. I used to pore over that book, taking good care to read the section on being morally straight. I learned not to steal or lie or abuse my body. When I earned my Eagle, Dad told me I was ready now, ready to take care of a family, be a man.
SO I GOT to digging. It was all I could think to do for them.
Truth is, I was thinking about the war. The comfort of a foxhole at the end of the long lost day, the feel of cold wet dirt on the face.
8
Grace
AFTER OUR FATHER GETS RID OF FRANCES, HE PERKS UP. In addition to a bomb shelter, he decides we also need to outfit our basement for tornadoes. The almanac has predicted multiple tornadoes for 1958, you never know when you are going to find yourself in the path of one. It’s good to be prepared.
“Don’t you think hurricanes are more likely? We’re not far from the coast,” I point out to him.
“Of course I’ve considered hurricanes, Grace,” he says as he lines up candles and flashlights on the kitchen counter. “I’ve considered all disasters. The difference between a hurricane and the Bomb or a tornado is that a hurricane can be predicted well in advance. We can evacuate.”
He strides through the house, lists and charts and graphs in his hand, opening cupboards, checking items off his lists, his eyes busy, interested. We’ll travel light for the tornado, just some water and canned goods; the bomb shelter is another story, we could be down there for months. Bomb or no bomb, the idea of getting into a hole in the ground gives me the heebie-jeebies. Just last week a bunch of men got buried alive in West Virginia when a mine shaft fell in on them. I eye my father, who is looking downright scrawny these days. Why does he think he can dig a better hole than the Raleigh-Wyoming Coal Company? At night when I lie in bed, my nose fills up with dirt, my hands scratch at the muck, trying to swim underground.
Dad divides his time between digging the monster hole in the backyard and nailing boards across the windows of the basement. He sweeps out the basement, attacking the ancient spider webs on the ceiling beams. He carries armloads of Beanee Weenees, powdered milk, and ten-gallon bottles of water down the steps and stacks them on the basement shelves next to his supply of cherry bounce. He orders three sleeping bags and multiple boxes of candles from Sears, gets blankets and pillows at McCoy’s Dry Goods downtown, all of which he totes down to the basement and rolls up neatly in a corner.
“Why don’t you just let us stay in the tornado shelter for the Bomb?” June says in her most reasonable voice, leaning out over the basement stairs. She adds hopefully, “Or we could hop in the bomb shelter when the tornado comes.” June hates basements as much as I hate the idea of being in a hole in the ground. This is my fault. Once, when we were little, I told
her there was a puppy in the basement. When she scampered down to see, I locked the door. I didn’t leave her for long, but when I opened the door, I nearly knocked her down the steps; she was huddled on the first step. She lunged past me, trembling and crying. I said I was sorry, I didn’t know she was such a baby.
Now Dad comes to the bottom of the stairs and glares up at her, a single hanging bulb illuminating his face, which is pink from exertion. “Because the radiation from the Bomb can invade concrete, that’s why. The denser the material, the less chance we’ll be contaminated. Plus, the house might collapse on top of us from the blast, seal us in. We could be buried alive.” His tone is stern.
I’m standing behind June and yell down to him, “When the siren goes off, how are we going to know whether it’s a tornado or the Bomb?” I punch my sister in the ribs and giggle. Our town has a siren, but its mournful foghorn doesn’t distinguish among emergencies. It is the first time since our mother died that my sister and I have laughed.
“We’ll have some warning about war, the Bomb coming,” he says, frowning. “We are on the brink of annihilation, girls. It’s no laughing matter. Go get me the flashlights.”
AS DAD PROCEEDS in his efforts to save us from an assortment of disasters, June returns to recipe hunting, her books and homework sheets thrown to the floor beside the bed. She scribbles notes on a page of the cookbook. “You’re going to get put back,” I say. “You’re not Miss Brilliant, you know.”
She looks up from her scribbling. “You’re not the boss of me.” Her face is pinched, her eyes glittery as a bird’s. “Grace, I’m just trying to get some decent food on the table.”
There’s an urgency in her tone I appreciate. Between digging one shelter and outfitting another, Dad’s questionable interest in cooking has evaporated altogether. My sister and I have been eating more and more Rice Krispies, sometimes with milk, sometimes without when he forgets to buy it. In the afternoons after school, we go down to the basement and steal some of his stash of Beanee Weenees and eat them out of the can since we aren’t allowed to use the stove. We mash sugar and flour and Crisco together and use Mama’s biscuit cutter to make raw cookies, which we flavor with vanilla. These make us jittery and snappish. Every month I feel woozy when I bleed. The edges of June’s mouth crack. In bed at night, I touch and retouch my rib cage.