Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Finally I went upstairs and lay down on the bed to think things over. My father was coming home. I didn’t know how to feel about that. He was always yelling at someone when he was home. He was always yelling at my mother to make me mind.

  “What do you mean, you can’t catch her,” I could hear him yelling. “Hit her with a broom. Hit her with a table. Hit her with a chair. But, for God’s sake, Ariane, don’t let her talk to you that way.”

  Well, maybe it would take a while for him to get home. First they had to finish off Japan. First they had to sink the other half into the sea. I curled up in my soft old eiderdown comforter. I was feeling great. We had dropped the biggest bomb in the world on Japan and there were plenty more where that one came from.

  I fell asleep in the hot sweaty silkiness of the comforter. I was dreaming I was at the wheel of an airplane carrying the bomb to Japan. Hit ’em, I was yelling. Hit ’em with a mountain. Hit ’em with a table. Hit ’em with a chair. Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sky. I dropped one on the brick house where the bad man lived, then took off for Japan. Down we dive, spouting a flame from under. Off with one hell of a roar. We live in flame. Buckle down in flame. For nothing can stop the Army Air Corps. Hit ’em with a table, I was yelling. Hit ’em with a broom. Hit ’em with a bomb. Hit ’em with a chair.

  Perils of the Nile

  Rhoda got up from her seat just as the house lights were going on, licked the rest of the Milky Way from her fingers, and looked around to see if any of the boys she liked were still there. Bebber Dyson was half-asleep in his usual Saturday afternoon seat, but he was too small and dark and poor to be of any real interest to Rhoda, even if he had shown her the eight-page book when they were collecting paper for the sixth-grade paper drive.

  She rubbed her tongue across her teeth and gave a little shudder thinking of the picture of Dick Tracy sticking his thing into the dog.

  She waved at Bebber and he started her way. Well, he was better than no one at all she thought. After all, he was the best basketball player in the whole school. He was such a good basketball player the seventh grade let him play in their games.

  It was a mystery to Rhoda that Bebber was such a good basketball player. No one knew where he came from. He didn’t have a proper home. He didn’t have regular meals or ironed clothes or parents that went to the PTA. All he had was a father that drank and some rooms above a store.

  It belied everything Rhoda knew about basketball. Rhoda’s brother had special basketball shoes and special pregame basketball training meals and his own basketball goal above the garage door to practice on. Rhoda’s father even had the concrete people come and pour concrete under the goal so they could mark off the free throw lines.

  But no matter how many hours Rhoda’s brother stood at the free throw line practicing shots he could only get the ball through the hoop half the time.

  Bebber Dyson’s shots always went through the hoop. He could shoot sideways and underhanded and over his head and one-handed and two-handed and every single time the basketball went through the hoop. Perhaps it was because he stayed at the pool hall all the time Rhoda thought. Perhaps it was because he was poor. Maybe you have to be poor to be a good basketball player.

  “How you doing?” Bebber said, coming up beside her, smiling his wide smile. His teeth were very white and even like a movie star’s. He was wearing his blue polo shirt. He wore the same shirt nearly every day, but he was always clean and he smelled nice. He didn’t smell bad like most poor people.

  “Where’s your friend Cynthia?” he asked. “She didn’t come with you today?”

  “She had to go riding with her mother,” Rhoda said. “They made her go. She almost died she wanted to see this picture so much. Gene Kelly’s her favorite. She loves him.”

  Cynthia was Rhoda’s best friend. Her mother was always taking her off horseback riding on the weekends. It made Rhoda’s heart burn with envy and admiration to see them going off in their boots and jodhpurs. Rhoda wondered if Bebber was in love with Cynthia. Cynthia had funny taste in boys. Come to think of it Bebber did look something like Gene Kelly.

  “I don’t like Gene Kelly very much myself,” she said. “I think he looks like a girl.”

  “He’s a good dancer,” Bebber said.

  “He’s okay,” Rhoda said, “but he smiles too much.”

  “Where you going now?” Bebber asked. “You want to go to the drugstore and see if anyone’s there?”

  “Sure,” Rhoda said. She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to be seen with Bebber, but she liked the idea of going in the drugstore with a boy. Maybe someone would think they had a date. Maybe Joe Franke would see her and think Bebber loved her.

  “Hey,” she said. “You want to see what I got today. Look at this.” She held out her hand. Then she froze, looking down at her hand in horror. It was gone.

  The ring was gone. Her brand-new antique pearl ring that had come in the mail from her grandmother that very morning was gone. She stared down at her finger, cold and disbelieving. It was not there. Her grandmother’s own pearl ring that had come in the mail from Mississippi, her long-awaited birthday ring, her heirloom, her precious heirloom pearl solitaire ring that she was not under any circumstances supposed to wear was no longer on her finger.

  “Bebber,” she said. “Bebber, I’ve lost my ring.” She dropped to the floor on her knees and began searching under the seats with her fingers, running her hands through the sticky jumble of popcorn sacks and candy wrappers and Coca-Cola cups.

  “What does it look like?” he said, kneeling beside her, blocking the aisle where the last stragglers from the Saturday matinee were making their way out into the sunlit world of Seymour, Indiana.

  “It’s a pearl,” she said. “It’s a real pearl solitaire set in gold. It’s valuable. It’s worth about a hundred dollars and my grandmother sent it for my birthday and they’re going to kill me for losing it.”

  “Well, calm down,” Bebber said. “We’ll find it. Just calm down and pick up everything that’s down there and shake it out.” He dropped to his knees beside her, smelling the sweet sweaty smell of her blouse. She was a strange girl, a funny girl who talked all the time and acted like she wasn’t afraid of anything, not even the teacher. Once she faked a faint on the playground and was taken home in the principal’s car without once opening her eyes or admitting she could hear.

  He had walked her home one afternoon after school, and her mother made chocolate milk for them and stayed in the kitchen talking to them while they drank it. She praised him when he picked up his glass and rinsed it in the sink.

  Bebber thought about Rhoda’s mother a lot. She was very beautiful and had looked straight at him out of sad blue eyes while he talked about himself. Rhoda’s whole family were strange people. They had come to Seymour from the south and talked a strange soft way. Whenever he passed their house he wished he could go in and talk to Rhoda’s mother some more.

  “If I don’t find it they’re going to kill me,” she said. “They’re going to murder me.”

  “Where do you think you lost it?” he asked, running his hand up and down the grooves between the folding seats.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I had it when I came in the show because I showed it to Letitia. Letitia said it was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen in her life.”

  “Maybe it got in your popcorn sack,” Bebber said. “Maybe you ate it.”

  “I did not eat it,” Rhoda said. Rhoda was very conscious of her figure. She hated to be reminded that she ever ate anything. “And that isn’t funny, Bebber. And if I don’t find that ring they’re going to kill me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll get the usher. We can use his flashlight. You be picking up the rest of the paper.” As Bebber started to rise up from the floor he felt the ring, cold and flat beneath his fingers on the worn runner of the aisle carpet. His fingers closed around it and he stood up and stuck his hands into his pockets.

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sp; “I’ll be back,” he said. “You keep on looking.”

  He returned with the usher, and the three of them searched the floor and seats for a long time, retracing Rhoda’s steps from the time she came into the theater, shaking out every piece of paper and box and cup and poking down into dozens of seats and crannies.

  “Maybe you didn’t really have it on,” Bebber said. “Maybe you just thought you wore it.”

  “I had it,” Rhoda said. “I showed it to Letitia.”

  “There’s no place else to look,” the usher said. “And the manager wants to close up now. We’re having a special show tonight for the war effort. Everyone that brings a piece of steel gets in free. It’s Journey for Margaret with Margaret O’Brien.”

  “But what about my ring?” Rhoda said. “How’ll I ever find it?”

  “We’ll make an announcement tonight,” the usher said. “How about that. We’ll announce that anyone that finds it should turn it in to the box office.”

  “All right,” Rhoda said. “I guess that’s all I can do.”

  “Come on,” Bebber said. “Let’s go over to the drugstore and see if anyone’s there.”

  “I don’t feel like it now,” Rhoda said. “I better go on home.”

  “You want me to go home with you?” Bebber asked. “You want me to help you tell your mother?”

  “No,” she said. “I probably won’t tell her until I have to. She’s going to murder me when she finds out.”

  When Rhoda got home she went up to her room, closed the door, and threw herself down on the eiderdown comforter. Why does everything have to happen to me, she thought. Every time something happens it happens to me. She rubbed her face deep down into the silk comforter, feeling the cool fabric against her cheeks, smelling the queer dead odor of the down feathers. She pulled out a few pieces where the little white tips were working their way out of the silk.

  The eiderdown comforter was Rhoda’s favorite thing in the house. It was dark red on one side and pink on the other. Rhoda liked to roll up in it on hot afternoons and pretend she was Cleopatra waiting for Mark Antony to come kiss her.

  Sometimes Cynthia would play the game with her, but Cynthia made a desultory Roman general and her kisses were brief and cold and absentminded. It was better to play Cleopatra alone.

  When she was alone Rhoda pretended the bed was a barge floating down the Nile and she was the queen reclining on a silken couch being fed by slaves, her hair combed and perfumed, her sleek half-naked body being pampered and touched and adored a thousand ways. She lay still, quiet and gracious, watching the shore glide by as she surveyed her kingdom.

  Rhoda’s bed was a cherry four-poster, and she could lie on her stomach on top of the comforter and rock the mattress back and forth by the pressure of her feet against the footboard. She would rock like that until she fell asleep, feeling strange and lost in time, a dark queen full of languorous passions.

  Today, however, the quilt was of no comfort to her. She was not due to have another valuable ring until her mother died and left her a diamond and that might be a long time as women in her family lived to ripe old ages.

  It occurred to her that she might pray for the ring. Usually Rhoda wasn’t much on praying. When she said her prayers at night all she thought about was Jesus coming to get her in a chariot filled with angels. She didn’t want Jesus to come get her. She didn’t want to be lying in a box like Jerry Hollister, who was run over in his driveway by his own brother home on leave from the air corps.

  The whole fifth grade had gone to see Jerry lying in his casket. His face was white as chalk and he was wearing a suit, lying on his dining room table in a casket with his eyes permanently closed.

  Rhoda didn’t want anything to do with that. She didn’t want anything to do with Jesus or religion or little boys lying on their dining room tables with their eyes closed.

  When they made Rhoda go to church on Sundays she pretended she was someplace else. She didn’t want anything to do with God and Jesus and dead people and people nailed up on crosses or eaten by lions or tortured by Romans.

  This matter of the ring, however, was an emergency. At any moment Rhoda’s mother might call up the stairs and ask her to bring the ring to show to someone.

  I could pretend it was stolen she thought. I could say Del Rio stole it. Del Rio was the black woman who lived with them. Del Rio had come on a bus from Mississippi when Rhoda’s baby brother was born. Rhoda hated Del Rio. Del Rio was always lecturing Rhoda about not drinking out of the water bottle and threatening to sic a big dog on her if she didn’t stop teasing the baby. It would serve Del Rio right to go to jail for stealing.

  Of course it would never work. Del Rio would kill her, would come for her with a knife. Besides, the man at the picture show was going to announce that she had lost it. Everyone in town would be calling up to see if they had found it.

  I might as well pray, Rhoda said, getting up off the bed and looking around the room for a nice place to do some praying. The closet, Rhoda thought. That’s the best place. She went into the closet and pulled the door shut behind her. Her dresses and blouses hung primly on their pink silk hangers. Her shoe bags hung on the door beside her bowed head.

  “Well, Jesus,” Rhoda said, beginning her prayer. “You know I have to get that ring back. So if you will get it back to me I promise I’ll start believing in you.” She waited a minute to let that sink in, then continued.

  “If you’ll help me find it I’ll be nice to everyone from now on. I won’t yell at anyone and I won’t stick my finger in my crack when I take a bath. I’ll quit lying so much. I’ll quit hating Dudley and I’ll quit giving Cokes to the baby. If you’ll help me find it I’ll do everything you want from now on. I’ll even go overseas and be a missionary if that’s what you want.”

  Rhoda liked that idea. She could see herself standing on a distant seashore handing out bright fabrics to the childlike natives. Rhoda was beginning to feel quite holy. She was beginning to like talking to Jesus.

  “Jesus,” she continued, squirming around on the floor to get in a more prayerful position, picturing Jesus on a hill surrounded by his sheep. “Jesus,” she said, “to tell the truth I have always believed in you. And I’ll be going to Sunday school all the time now if I get my ring back.”

  It was very quiet in the closet. Rhoda could feel Jesus thinking. She felt him lay his hand upon her head. Jesus said he would think it over.

  Rhoda got up from her knees in a reverent manner and left the closet with her hands still folded. She was feeling better. The oppression that had weighed her down all afternoon was lifting. It was up to Jesus now. She decided to go downstairs and shoot some baskets with Dudley until time for supper.

  Bebber Dyson sat down on the unmade bed, took the ring from his pocket, and examined it in the light coming in on a slant through the low windows. His face was very still, and the high Indian cheekbones of his grandfather cast long shadows along the ridge of his nose.

  Bebber studied his treasure. It was an old-fashioned solitaire, a small pearl set in five slender prongs of gold.

  He touched the top of the pearl with his finger, then put it on and held his hand away from him, imagining Rhoda’s mother’s slender white hands.

  The ring was like her, elegant and still and foreign. Someday, he thought, he would drive a big car down a street to a house where a woman like that waited. Everything around her would be quiet and clean and she would hand him something to drink in a glass.

  He wrapped the ring in a piece of tissue paper and returned it to his pocket.

  Then he got up and made the bed, folding the corners neatly and smoothing out all the wrinkles.

  Next he walked around the small apartment, emptying the ashtrays and wiping off the flat surfaces with a towel. He swept the floor, picked up the sweepings in a dustpan, and deposited them in a paper sack.

  He removed his clothes and laid them on the bed to inspect them for spots. He walked over to the sink and carefully washed out th
e blue shirt, scrubbing it good with plenty of soap, rinsing it and hanging it on a hanger by the window.

  Then he began to wash himself, very carefully and thoroughly, beginning with his hair, working down to his arms and chest and legs and feet. He washed himself as if he were some foreign object, oblivious to the beauty and symmetry of his body, to the smooth shine of his olive skin, to the order and intelligence of his parts.

  He dried himself, then wiped up the mess the water had made on the floor. He brushed and parted his hair and dressed carefully in his good clothes, gray pants, white shirt, and a sleeveless dark green sweater.

  He walked down the stairs and out onto the street. The early autumn dusk was magical, long rays of red slanting light catching the bottom branches of the elm trees.

  He walked down Pershing Avenue to where it turns onto Calvin Boulevard, imagining what Rhoda’s mother would be doing this time of day, holding her baby, laughing into his tiny face, walking around her kitchen fixing dinner, her high-heeled shoes clicking on the linoleum.

  Maybe she would ask him to stay for chocolate milk. Maybe she would ask him to stay for dinner.

  The light was changing now, deepening. Bebber began to hum a little tune to himself as he walked along, feeling clean and lucky, fondling the little package in his pocket, picturing the way her hair moved around her shoulders when she talked.

  I will be riding up on a white horse he thought. I will be wearing a uniform and she will be standing on the porch holding her baby. It is too cold for her to be outside like that. I will give her my coat. I will put her on the horse and take her wherever she needs to go. I will walk slowly because it is dangerous to ride that way carrying a baby.

  Bebber walked on down the street, the rays of the setting sun making him a path all the way to her house, a little road to travel, a wide band of luminous and precarious order.

  Blue Satin

  Rhoda’s most easily manipulated grandmother had come to stay with Rhoda and her brothers while Rhoda’s parents went off to a football game in Lexington, Kentucky. Her grandmother’s name was Nell and she was very nervous about this plan. She loved her grandson Dudley, who was a perfect little man, and she was fairly certain she could care for the baby, Ingersol, even though there was only one servant in the house and that was a cleaning woman who left as soon as she could every day and didn’t seem to enjoy her work. This was southern Illinois and it was a long way from the Mississippi Delta. Nell much prefered visiting her daughters in New Orleans but Ariane had begged and begged and finally she had given in and agreed to stay four days alone with the children.