The Book of Bright Ideas

by Sandra Kring

  “But still…” Aunt Verdella said.

  Freeda stood up. She stared out the window that overlooked the empty field and rubbed her belly. She yawned. “Shit, I’ve gotta find a job before we die of starvation and I die of boredom.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” Aunt Verdella said. “Marty’s Place is almost remodeled now, honey, so you can go in and see him about that job. Reece said he’s still looking for another girl.” Aunt Verdella sighed. “You poor thing, having so much responsibility resting on your young shoulders. And with no one to count on but yourself. Maybe you’ll find a nice guy to marry right here in Dauber who’ll help lighten your load.”

  Freeda looked at Aunt Verdella and laughed. “Who says a man would lessen my load? What planet you living on, anyway? Damn, that’s the last thing I need.” She looked down at me, her green eyes lemony-colored with the sunlight shining through the sides of them. “Here’s a tip for you, kiddo. Men are good for one thing, and one thing only. And hell, you don’t even really need them for that either. Remember that.”

  Aunt Verdella glanced over at me, like I’d just heard something I shouldn’t have, but I wasn’t sure what that something was. Then she looked back at Freeda, her eyes still filled with worry. “Still, it’s gotta be rough, having so much responsibility at your age. How old are you, anyway? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Well, still, you must have been pretty young when you started carrying this load all by yourself. How long have your folks been gone now, honey?”

  “Daddy, about fifteen years, I guess. Ma, four.”

  “Oh my, to lose your folks that young, and to have to raise your little sister alone.”

  “I’m used to being on my own,” Freeda says. “I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen years old. I don’t need nobody taking care of me.”

  “Since you were sixteen?”

  Freeda picked up her cup and took another sip, but she didn’t sit down. “Yep, that’s how old I was when I took off. Sixteen.”

  “Took off, as in ran away?”

  “That’s right. I didn’t step one foot back in that dump for five years. I just pulled into town the night before Ma died. Came home one day, went out that night, came back in around noon the next day, and found her deader than a doornail on the kitchen floor.”

  Aunt Verdella’s freckly hand clamped over her chest, and she looked ready to cry. “Oh dear, how awful!”

  Freeda’s shoulders made a quick shrug. “Yeah, well…I called Ma’s sister—she lived just down the road—and told her to call that piece of slime they call a brother from the bar, because Ma was dead and I’d called the funeral home to come get her and I was taking off. I grabbed my bags, a few things for Winnalee, told them where to send the ashes, and I got the hell outta there.”

  While Aunt Verdella was staring at her, her mouth hanging wide open, Freeda turned and shouted toward the bathroom, where Winnalee was still singing and splashing. “Crissakes, Winnalee! You’ve gotta be shriveled up like a prune by now. Get the hell out of there. I’ve gotta job-hunt today, and I sure as hell can’t go like this. Now move it!” Winnalee kept on singing and splashing. Freeda cussed under her breath, then said, “Damn kid. You can’t hardly ever get her into the goddamn tub. Then once you do, you can’t get her out.”

  Aunt Verdella was watching Freeda, her face still looking upset. “But there were arrangements to be made, of course. And, oh my, you needed some support at a time like that, honey. I don’t mean to pry, it’s just that I’m trying to understand why you’d just take Winnalee and leave at a time like that.”

  “I don’t mind you prying. Ask me anything, I don’t care. I ain’t got nothing to hide.” She pulled a bobby pin out of her penny hair and opened it with her teeth, then retucked a loose strand back to the top of her head. “I wasn’t about to hang around there and listen to my aunt and Ma’s old biddy friends give me bullcrap about how I killed my ma by running off, then coming back out of the blue. And I sure as hell wasn’t gonna leave Winnalee behind to be raised by her sister, that religious freak, or worse yet, their loser brother, the son of a bitch.”

  Freeda sat down, lifted her bare legs, and curled her long toes over the edge of the table again, like they were fingers. “As if I had anything to do with her dropping dead. My ma didn’t give a shit about me leaving, and she didn’t give a shit about me coming home either. The only thing that woman ever cared about was eating. She goddamn ate herself to death, that’s what she did. Just like Daddy drank himself to death. She had these big-ass stools parked all over that damn kitchen and pulled herself from one to the next, baking and eating till she looked like a bloated wood tick that fell off some mangy dog. I wasn’t about to be blamed for any of that.”

  “Oh my. Poor little Winnalee,” Aunt Verdella said, making her voice as small as she could. “She’d never even met you, right? How on earth did you get her to go with you, being a perfect stranger?”

  Freeda got up and went to the refrigerator, opening it and peering in. “No, she hadn’t met me, but my pictures were hanging around the walls—probably because Ma was too goddamn lazy to take them down—so Winnalee knew about me, of course. God knows what stories Ma told her, but I guess Winnalee decided I was her best bet. Not like I gave her a choice, anyway.”

  Freeda slammed the fridge door shut without taking anything from it. “Okay, enough, Winnalee! Now get the hell out of that tub!”

  Freeda turned back to Aunt Verdella, her hands on her hips. “Hell, if you’re gonna overindulge in something, it might as well be sex. At least sex won’t rot your liver or clog your goddamn arteries. That’s my theory, anyway.”

  Then her laugh stopped. She marched into the bathroom, where Winnalee was singing a made-up song about fairies.

  “What are you doing? Don’t let my water out!” Winnalee screamed. We heard a couple wet slaps and then some more yelling.

  Aunt Verdella hurried to the bathroom door. “Come on now, honey,” she said. “Button here is waiting to play with you.”

  I heard the bathwater gurgle as the last of it chugged down the drain, then Winnalee came into the kitchen, butt-naked, her long curls dripping. She didn’t have any red slap marks on her crinkly skin, so I figured maybe she was the one who’d been doing the slapping.

  “Come on,” she called to me, as she ran through the kitchen, her feet padding wet prints across the floor.

  “Get your ass back here and wipe up these goddamn puddles! You hear me?”

  Winnalee ignored Freeda and kept running.

  I followed her up the stairs, where she dug in her closet for something to wear. She grabbed a pair of red shorts with sailboats on them and a pink shirt with yellow flowers and put them on. She didn’t bother to put on underpants first.

  I watched the door, waiting for Freeda to race up the stairs and give it to Winnalee good for not minding, but she didn’t come.

  “Hey, I thought of something else we need for our adventure,” Winnalee said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A compass. Tommy said the beck is straight west. If we have a compass, we can find it.”

  Out of the two windows above the window seat, I could see the patch of white pine Tommy had pointed to. The one that led to the beck, he said. And to Fossard’s ghost. Just looking out at that clump of trees made me scared.

  Winnalee kicked at the dirty clothes on her floor. She watched me as she did this. When she heard a clunk, Winnalee rooted around with her foot. When she brought her foot up, the handle of a hairbrush was stuck between her toes. She took it from her foot, flicking aside the pair of underwear that was snagged on the bristles. “You’re scared to go look for fairies, aren’t you?” I bit the inside of my cheek and shook my head. “You are too,” she said. She tilted her head and her hair dripped down her side, all the way past her hip.

  “All because of that ghost Tommy talked about.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if I’m so scared of that ghos
t,” I lied. “It’s just that I’m going to get in a heap of trouble for running off.”

  Winnalee brought me her hairbrush, then plunked down on her bed beside me and twisted herself so I could reach the back of her head. “Ouch! Start from the bottom first, then brush the topper parts,” she said.

  As I pulled the brush down, her hair straightened, then sprung back into loops once the brush left it. I watched it, thinking of how if I had her hair, I’d brush it all day long.

  “You are too scared. Because you’re afraid of dead people.” She paused a minute, like she was thinking hard, then she said, “You’re scared of live people too. But you don’t have to be a-scared of either.”

  Winnalee got up. She turned and yanked the brush out of my hand and tossed it on the unmade bed. She grabbed me by the shirt and tugged me over to the window seat, where her ma was sitting in that jar. She leaned over, her still-damp fingers fumbling for my wrist. “Ma?” she said right to the jar. “Button’s scared of dead people, so I’m gonna have her talk to you a bit so she can see that dead people aren’t going to hurt her. Oh, and I washed behind my ears too.” I grabbed at my cheek skin with my teeth. “Go on, Button,” she said. “Just say anything to her. If you do, you won’t be so scared of dead people anymore.”

  I’d been Winnalee’s best friend for nine days now. Long enough to know that if Winnalee had something on her mind for me to do, she wasn’t about to let up till I did it. I didn’t lean down, but my head did, and I said, “Hi.”

  Winnalee waited, like maybe I was going to say more. I waited for her to stop waiting, but it didn’t look like she was going to, so I leaned over again and added, “And I washed behind my ears today too.”

  When I backed away, she said to me, “You should practice talking to live people too.”

  Then she crossed the room and fetched her Book of Bright Ideas out from under her pillow (where she said she was gonna keep it from now on, in case she got a good idea right before she fell asleep), and she opened it up and wrote: Bright Idea #86: If you’re scared of dead people, then you’re probably scared of live people too. But you don’t got to be scared of either.

  6

  It was a Saturday, so I couldn’t go see Winnalee. Ma made me clean my room, stripping down the bedding, and dusting, and then I had to dust the rest of the rooms. She checked on me over and over again and corrected me when I didn’t make neat enough corners with my sheets and when I left streaks of Pledge on my nightstand. We were cleaning good because Aunt Stella was stopping by that night, while on her way to Minneapolis to see a friend. Aunt Stella lived about three hours away from Dauber. She looked just like Ma, but older, and not so tall, and not so skinny. She sniffed a lot, even when she didn’t have a cold.

  Since I couldn’t have any fun, I busied myself while I worked by thinking about me and Winnalee’s plans to go find the fairies. We already had a plan sheet that we kept in Winnalee’s shoe box. So far, we just had a list of some of the things we needed to bring along. Things like peanut butter sandwiches and cookies, Kool-Aid, if we could find something that shut tight to pour it in, shoes for Winnalee, and a compass and a map to help us find that beck. While I stood on a stool and waited for Ma to take down her bell collection so she could wash them and I could dust the shelf, I wondered where we’d come up with a map to show us the way to the beck. Winnalee and me had been working on the plans for three weeks now, which told me that big adventures sure did take big planning.

  “Evelyn?” Ma said. “Are you going to answer me or not?”

  I started making those noises (that Aunt Verdella once called a “nerve tic,” or something like that) in my throat, because I didn’t know what the question was, so I didn’t know what the answer should be.

  “You weren’t listening, were you?”

  When I cleared my throat, it sounded like the sputtering of a car that just didn’t want to start.

  “I asked what you and that little girl do while you’re at Aunt Verdella’s,” she said. Her voice was slow, and lower than it usually sounded.

  The truth was, when we weren’t making plans to go find the fairies, we played games Winnalee made up. Like riding out west on sticks to lasso wild horses, then sitting in the saloons while the cowboys hit each other over the heads with beer bottles, because they all wanted to be our only boyfriends. Or we’d play TV. We’d put on Winnalee’s dress-up clothes, and then I’d sit cross-legged on the floor while Winnalee stood on the bed. I was the audience lady, and she was the actress. And, boy, did she have good stories! One day, when I thought up a story of my own, it would be my turn to be the actress. Till then, though, I was just gonna be the audience lady. I didn’t tell Ma these things though. Instead, I just said, “We play.”

  “Play what?” she asked, and her voice sounded strange again. I stopped clearing my throat when a car sounded in the driveway. Ma peeked out the window. “Oh God, don’t tell me…” she said.

  I looked out the window, just as Aunt Verdella was getting out of her car. I watched her walk up the little stones leading to the house, Winnalee hopping alongside of her, her ma in her arms.

  Aunt Verdella waved to me, then yelled, “Yoo-hoo!” as she was coming through the door without knocking, like she always did.

  Aunt Verdella gave me a hug first, then she told Ma she had to use the phone.

  “What’cha doin’?” Winnalee asked. I was glad she was wearing real clothes today but wished she had on shoes. She started circling the living room, gawking at everything, her fingers smearing over the tables I’d just polished.

  “I just got done cleaning,” I said, remembering to say my g at the end, because Ma didn’t like it when I sounded like a “country hick,” like Aunt Verdella.

  Aunt Verdella picked up the phone, then said, “Oh, sorry, Louise,” and set the receiver down. She came into the living room and flopped down on the chair we weren’t supposed to sit down hard in, because we’d break the springs, then said, “Oh, Jewel, Reece asked me to grab some electrical tape while I’m here. I know Rudy’s got some layin’ around somewhere, but you think I can find it? I couldn’t believe it when I saw Reece at Mae’s place so early this morning, workin’ away. He fixed the front door so it doesn’t scrape anymore too.”

  “What does he need electrical tape for?” Ma asked, and Aunt Verdella told her she didn’t know.

  “Button, honey, will you pick up the phone and see if Mrs. Slaga is still on the line?” I hated checking, because folks would get real crabby when you picked up the phone while they were talking. But I did as I was told. I held the receiver to my big ear, and sure enough, Mrs. Slaga was still talking. I put it down carefully.

  “If Louise is on there much longer, I’ll ask her if she’ll get off for just a bit. I’ve gotta call Henry and reserve a place for the first sale. I can’t believe that the community sale starts in two weeks already. Where does time go, anyway? I’m gonna tell him that he’d better not put me on a lot in the far back either. The old codgers like my baked goods, and that’s too far for some of them to walk.”

  I took my dust rag and brought it to Ma, telling her I was done. Ma gawked at the bell shelf, then at the floor where Aunt Verdella’s cruddy shoes were resting. She looked over at Winnalee, who was touching the little glass doll who was riding a wire bike over the end table. I knew she wanted Aunt Verdella and Winnalee to go away so she could stay busy, making everything perfect for Aunt Stella.

  Aunt Verdella went back into the kitchen and picked up the phone again. This time she asked Mrs. Slaga if she could use the line for a little bit. She told her why she wanted it and why she didn’t want that back lot.

  “Can we play while Aunt Verdella talks, since you’re done cleaning?” Winnalee asked.

  “Why don’t you girls color,” Ma said, so I told Winnalee, “Come on,” and she followed me into my room. “I got a brand-new coloring book. It’s all ballerinas.”

  As I got out my box of crayons, sixty-four count, Winnalee looked around my ro
om. She grabbed my Barbie, who was propped in her doll stand on my dresser, and examined her. “It’s a lady doll!” she said. “Ohhhh, she’s pretty!” She looped her fingers around Barbie’s blond ponytail, then poked at her bumps. “Hey, she’s got boobies! I never saw a doll with boobies before!” She giggled, then she tugged down the top of Barbie’s zebra swimming suit to look at them. I glanced at the door and wished I’d thought to close it. “She doesn’t have any nipples,” she said.

  I hurried to fetch my coloring book.

  “We have to color on the kitchen floor,” I told Winnalee.

  “Why?” she asked, and I told her I didn’t know, but that was the rule.

  Me and Winnalee picked out pages with two good pictures on both sides, then we stretched out on the floor, the linoleum cool against our bellies. “Hey, can I have that one instead?” Winnalee asked. “I like the way her arms are stretched above her head. Look, they make a heart shape!” I told Winnalee we could trade, and she rolled over the top of me, her hair tickling my bare arm as she went.

  Winnalee didn’t know about outlining the picture first so your crayon stops you from coloring outside of the lines. She didn’t care when I told her either. She just started coloring the curtain on the stage, her fist going up and down for a few swipes, then back and forth; not all in one direction, like you’re supposed to. She colored one side of the curtain green and the other side purple. She made her lady’s skirt black, not a pretty color, then said, “I like black dresses. They’re sexy.” Then she leapt to her feet, lifted her arms, and shook her butt back and forth real fast, and said, “Sexyyyyyyyy!”

  I didn’t know what “sexy” meant for sure, but Ma obviously did. She must not have liked sexy at all either, because her face got so tight that it looked like her cheekbones were going to pop right through her skin. She set down the bowl she’d just pulled from the cupboard and came over to Winnalee, snatching the black crayon out of her hand. “In this house, we use pretty colors—girl colors—for ladies’ dresses.” I slid my fist off of my page so Ma could see that I was using pretty girl colors for my ballerina’s dress. Pink, with yellow trim.