Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  The problem was Rhoda. Rhoda was a bad little girl to begin with and on top of that Ariane had spoiled her rotten. Anything Rhoda thought up to do she did. She was the most difficult child Nell had ever seen. “I don’t know where that child came from,” she had told her daughter a hundred times. “No one in our family was ever rude.” But of course she knew where Rhoda came from. From her father and her maternal grandmother, both of whom ran roughshod over life. “Hit her with a tree if she misbehaves,” Dudley said, and laughed out loud. “Hit her with a broom. Hit her with a chair.”

  “He always says that,” Ariane added. “But he never does a thing to her. All he does is give her money.”

  Rhoda stood in the door to the dining room listening to them discuss her. She always listened to the adults talk. She listened to every word they said if she didn’t have anything better to do. She had a lot to do. She had projects going all around the house and in the garden shed and underneath the porch. She had dead wasp collections and books she was writing and catalogs she was ordering out of for the girls on Paradise Island and holes she was digging to China and doll hospitals and crossword puzzles and codes she was making up and books she was reading. She was busy morning, noon, and night but sometimes she took time to listen to her parents talk about her. They said the same things over and over again like a lullaby. “She’s just like you, Dudley,” her mother would always say for the coup de grace. Then her mother would lower her eyes flirtatiously as if to say, Who but me could have given you your heart’s desire, a child as wild and selfish as you are.

  “Hit her if she sasses you,” he’d answer. “Hit her with a broom. Hit her with a chair.” Then he would take Rhoda off with him to the bank or let her drive the truck or buy her a new bicycle whether they could afford it or not. “Your mother doesn’t need to be getting upset,” he’d tell Rhoda. “Try to be nice to her, Sister. Try to help her a little bit with the baby.”

  Rhoda would try to help out with the baby but the baby bored her. She wasn’t interested in babies. She was interested in pilots and queens and kings and card games and Chinese checkers and Monopoly and walking around town seeing what was going on.

  The afternoon before her parents left for the football game, Dudley took Rhoda off into the yard and gave her twenty-five dollars and a lecture. “You be helpful to your grandmother, sugar,” he told her. “Help her with Ingersol. I’m counting on you to lend a hand with him, Rhoda. I’m counting on you to help take care of things around here.”

  “What’s this money for?”

  “In case you need anything. In case she needs you to get something for her. Dudley will be in charge. Don’t let me hear any bad reports on you when I get back. I’m counting on you to act like a big girl.”

  “I will. You can count on me.” Rhoda smiled and let her father hug her close to him. He was wearing khaki pants and a white shirt and a fine tweed jacket he had bought in Louisville. He was the strongest man in the world and the funniest. She was going to make him proud of her. He didn’t need to worry about a thing. She was going to come up to his expectations.

  She put the money in the pocket of her plaid skirt and walked up the stairs to her room. Ingersol was playing on the bottom of the stairs. She patted him on the head. She overcame her disgust at his diapers. After all, he was the cutest baby on the block and the fattest.

  She hummed to herself as she went up the stairs to her room. Blue heaven and you and I. And stars climbing a desert sky. A desert breeze whispering a lullaby. Only stars above you to see I love you. Rhoda rode across the desert on an Arabian stallion. Only the stars could guide her. She was wearing long robes and a burnoose. Her horse loved her so much she barely had to touch the reins. She was riding to meet her boyfriend in the night. It was Joe Franke in his coonskin cap. No, it was Hop-along Cassidy, who had been her father’s roommate at Auburn University. Hoppy was waiting for her. There was a murder to solve in the desert.

  Rhoda went into her room and put on her jodhpurs and a white shirt and her boots. She threw the clothes she had been wearing on the floor. She lay down upon the bed and began to read a book about some girls in England going camping. Rhoda didn’t actually read books. She inhabited them. She moved into the page and across the barriers of space and time. This afternoon she was somewhere in Scotland camped near a forest.

  On Friday afternoon her parents left. They packed their leather suitcases into the trunk of the new Plymouth coupe and drove off like newlyweds. Rhoda and Dudley and Ingersol and their grandmother stood on the front steps and waved until the car was out of sight. “I only hope they have a good time,” Nell said. “Goodness knows, Ariane needs a rest. You all just work her to death. Help me with this baby, Sonny. Let’s take him inside and get him settled.” Dudley took his little brother by the hand and led him into the house. Nell sighed deeply and tugged at the waist of her dress to make it cover her petticoat. No matter how many times Ariane worked on her hems, her petticoat was always showing.

  Rhoda got on her bicycle and rode over to Cynthia’s house to see what was going on. Cynthia and her mother and her sisters had just returned from a shopping trip to Saint Louis. The living room was filled with fabrics and patterns and new shoes and socks and underwear. It started to make Rhoda jealous. Ariane never took her on shopping trips to Saint Louis. And she didn’t have any beautiful older sisters to run through the house wearing curlers in their hair.

  “I’m going shopping tomorrow,” Rhoda announced. “My mother went to a ballgame so I have to go by myself. Maybe Cynthia can come along and help me.” She stood there by the table full of new fabrics and looked so forlorn that Mrs. Allen forgot her natural tendency to make Cynthia spend Saturday mornings practicing the piano and dusting the living room and said, “Of course she can go. We would have taken you with us to Saint Louis if I’d thought about it. Here, look at this material. Maybe I will make you a vest to match the one I make for Cynthia.” It was a printed cotton fabric that was quilted. Rhoda immediately decided it was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen in her life.

  “I hate it,” Cynthia said. “It’s going to make me look fat as a pig.”

  “No, it is not,” Cynthia’s older sister, Martha Jane, who was Miss Perfect Every Minute of Her Life, put in. “Don’t you dare talk to mother like that, after all the trouble she goes to for you.”

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Allen said. “If Cynthia doesn’t want it, I’ll make it for Rhoda.” She put her arm around Rhoda and gave her a hug.

  “Send Rhoda in here,” Judge Allen called out from the den. “She’s the only twelve-year-old in town who likes to talk about books.”

  Rhoda went into the den and found the judge in his easy chair reading Twilight of the Gods. “I’ll lend you this as soon as I finish it,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on. Where are all the boys?”

  “Cynthia is still going steady with David,” Rhoda began. “But Mark is in love with her too and he keeps trying to get her to break up with David and go with him. Last week I thought she was going to start going steady with Mark, but then, at the last minute, David came over to my house and talked to her. I wish she’d go out with Harlon Childs. He’s the best football player in the state. I’d go out with him if I were her.”

  “Who are you in love with?” The judge leaned up from the chair and smiled his darling, wicked smile at her.

  “Oh, you know, the same one.” Rhoda’s face darkened into its tragic mode. “This boy down in the Delta who can’t go out with me because he has cystic fibrosis. It’s a terrible affliction. We don’t know if he’ll be able to walk pretty soon. I may be kin to him anyway. His name’s Bobby Mann. I guess I better write to him this afternoon. He’s going to have to go and live in Washington next year. It’s a hopeless love.”

  “You better go find old Harlon Childs yourself. You can’t spend your young life loving someone in Washington, D.C.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up, anyway. I won’t have time to
get married and have children.”

  Cynthia came into the den and grabbed Rhoda’s arm. “Come on, let’s get out of here before Martha Jane thinks of something for me to do.”

  Rhoda and Cynthia went out onto the porch and lay upside down in the swing to get rid of their double chins. “What are you going to get tomorrow?” Cynthia asked.

  “I don’t know. We’re just going shopping. We’ll see what we can find.” It was a fine fall afternoon. The leaves were turning on the trees. From upside down the ceiling of the porch and the trees in the front yard looked wonderful and mysterious. “I think I’ll go to Arabia pretty soon,” Rhoda began. “I want to go over there and see about those Arabian horses. It looks like it would be hard to ride on sand but it’s not. It’s easy as pie. You just sail across the sands. Those horses aren’t mean like the ones our mothers ride. They are just like people and can read your mind and know the way home from anywhere.”

  “What are you doing?” Martha Jane had come out the door and found them. “Get up from there right this minute. Anyone going down the street can see your underpants.”

  “They cannot,” Cynthia answered. “You’re just saying that because you have a double chin and you want us to have one too.”

  “I have to go home anyway.” Rhoda swung her legs down across the swing chains and stood up and straightened up her skirt. “I have to go help my grandmother take care of Ingersol.” She started down the stairs to her bicycle. She admired Martha Jane for being so beautiful and perfect. She wanted Martha Jane to like her and think of her as a darling little girl who always did what she was told. “See you tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder to Cynthia, who was still stoutly upside down on the swing. “I’ll come get you as soon as the stores open.”

  “They open at ten,” Martha Jane said.

  At nine-thirty the next morning Rhoda arrived at Cynthia’s to pick her up to go shopping. She had had a hard time convincing her grandmother that she was allowed to go downtown shopping with a friend but Dudley had taken up for her and convinced Nell to let her go. “What are you shopping for?” she had asked Rhoda. “Your mother didn’t say anything to me about you going shopping.”

  “I’m going to buy a dress to wear to parties,” Rhoda answered. “I want a dress for a change that isn’t navy blue or plaid.”

  Cynthia was waiting when Rhoda arrived. She had on her white peasant blouse and a long black skirt and a wide black belt with silver loops. She had slept all night in brown Kiddie Kurlers and her hair was curled all over her head. Cynthia and Rhoda were living for the day when they could buy permanent waves at the drug store and “give them” to each other but that day was several years away. Mrs. Allen said Cynthia couldn’t have one until she was in high school and Rhoda hadn’t even asked her mother yet. There had been a terrible episode with a permanent wave machine in a beauty parlor when Rhoda was only six and since then it was a subject that was never broached at the Mannings’ house.

  “Where are you going to shop?” Cynthia asked. They had begun to walk in the direction of the downtown square. They had passed the bakery and the turn-off to the junior high and were almost to the ice-cream parlor when Rhoda made up her mind. “I think I’ll start at the Fashion M’Lady,” she said. “I went there once with Momma and Doris Bordelon and they had the most beautiful clothes I’ve ever seen. Doris got this dress with a little bustle in the back. She’s got a baby now and she lets me see him nurse at her breast. It’s disgusting. His name is Little Bruce and she lets him suck as long as he wants. She just sits there and lets him do it.”

  “It makes me sick to think of it,” Cynthia agreed. They had passed the ice cream parlor with its faint curdled smell and were proceeding past the pool hall where Bebber Dyson was chalking his cue. He waved at them. He was the best basketball player in the sixth grade. He was so good the big boys let him play with them, but he didn’t have a girlfriend because he was just friends with everyone. He was friends with Rhoda and had shown her a book with cartoons of people having sexual intercourse on a table in it. She tried not to think about it but she couldn’t forget those pictures. Now, looking into the poolroom, she decided the place where most of that went on was probably in the poolroom at night.

  She took Cynthia’s arm. They were almost to the courthouse now, where the judge might be hanging out the windows of his chambers keeping tabs on them. Sure enough, he was standing in his window smoking his pipe and saw them coming and stuck his head out the window to wave. “Where are you going?” he called out. “Where are all the boys?”

  “We’re going shopping,” Rhoda called back to him. “I’m going to get a dress to dress up in.”

  At the drugstore they stopped and had lemon Cokes and shared a package of Nabs. Then they proceeded on down the street to the Fashion M’Lady. It was a small shop that was three times as long as it was wide. The front was a large plate-glass window and a door. The mannequin in the window on this day was wearing a tweed suit with suede high heels and a white suit shirt with a bow. Spread at her feet were rhinestone earrings and necklaces and bracelets and silver and brass hair combs. It was very elegant and Rhoda was sure she had come to the right store.

  A saleslady met them at the door. She knew Cynthia but she did not remember meeting Rhoda. “What can I do for you girls?” she asked.

  “I have twenty-five dollars. My parents are out of town. I need to buy a dress up dress in case I have to go somewhere. Do you have anything that’s got a peplum on it or a bustle?” Rhoda took the money out of her pocket and held it out in her hands. She was wearing a skirt exactly like the one Cynthia had on and a white camp shirt with short sleeves. She had on a wide red belt that her mother had let her buy at the dime store. She narrowed her eyes and surveyed the saleslady. You never could tell with grown people. Sometimes they could be trusted to take you seriously and sometimes they acted like everything Rhoda did was a joke. Rhoda was not in the mood to joke this morning. She was in the mood to shop.

  “Well, I’ll let you look,” the lady said. “What size do you think you wear?”

  “I don’t know. Let me see what you’ve got first.” Rhoda drew herself up to her full five foot two inches and pulled Cynthia up beside her. “Show us what to look at. We know the kind of thing we want.”

  It only took three minutes of going through the racks of clothes to find the dress that Rhoda knew she wanted. It was hanging in the very back of a sales rack. It had been fifteen dollars and was now reduced to nine dollars and fifty cents. It was pale blue satin. A pale blue satin sheath with a drape around the waist. It was strapless and on the back was a large blue satin flower with white silk stamens tipped in red. It was the most beautiful dress Rhoda had ever seen. It was a dress for Betty Grable to entertain the troops. It was a dress to wear to sing in a nightclub. Blue heaven and you and I. Underneath the desert robes and the burnoose Rhoda would be wearing this blue satin sheath dress. Her strong stout body slipped into it like a knife into its sheath. When she arrived at the desert king’s tent, when she dropped the robe from her shoulders, she would be standing there wearing this. The king would fall in love. He would stand stock-still and almost faint. You are too beautiful for one man alone, he would say. No time for that now, Rhoda would reply. I have to get into my jodhpurs. This message has to reach the troops. Come on, let’s go. I haven’t got all day.

  “I’ll try this on,” she said.

  “You’re going to put it on?” Cynthia asked. She was sitting on a little stool watching Rhoda go through the clothes. She was a good lieutenant. She obeyed orders. She never questioned a thing that Rhoda did.

  “Then come in here,” the saleslady said. There was no one else in the store. If the little girl wanted to try on the cocktail dress, what difference did it make to her. After all, the girl had twenty-five dollars. She might really mean to buy something with it.

  Rhoda put the satin dress on her little short body and looked and looked into the glass. Yes, you are too beautiful for one man alone, th
e king repeated. But you are just right to be my queen. You can ride like a man and we will have a lot of parties and you will of course wear the blue dress with the flower on the back. First we’ll have to get married.

  “I don’t get married,” Rhoda said out loud. “I think I’ll take it,” she told the saleslady. “Wrap it up.”

  They walked back by the drugstore and had another Coke. This time they got a cherry Coke and instead of eating Nabs they played the jukebox. They played “Open the Door, Richard” and then they played “Embraceable You.” They had been in a chorus line at the Lion’s Club Follies the year before and had done a routine to “Embraceable You.” They drank their cherry Cokes and hummed along to the music. Then they walked on back to Rhoda’s house, carrying the dress box between them by its string. It was one of the prettiest fall days there had ever been in Harrisburg, Illinois. It was a perfect day for two perfect girls. Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you. Embrace me, you irreplaceable you. Don’t be a naughty baby, come to Poppa, come to Poppa, do. My sweet embraceable you.

  They went singing into the house and found Nell sitting exhausted in a green chair. Ingersol had just fallen asleep after a long hard morning on his grandmother’s part.