by Joyce Meyer
Everyone on Wyoming Street would listen to me if I had something to say about Miss Shaw. I could explain the process by which she drove her Cadillac to the country and never came home with so much as a redbug on her grill. I could clear up questions about how she never wrinkled her crisp summer skirts nor nicked the heels of her shoes. I could unravel the mysteries of her birthplace, the source of her fortune, the fascinating circumstances that brought her to owning this store. And I’d have bet you my wages, all I could save of them, that her gloves would be clean as starched linen each time she came out of the workroom. Even though I’d seen the polishing rouge and tarnish rubbing off on them myself.
But except for asking if I’d miss my sister, Miss Shaw let my stories about Jean and Grace Kelly go by without offering so much as an iota of information about herself.
There are times when I think back and I can picture Mama happy. There are times I remember her moving along the clothesline in our backyard, pegging bedsheets to the wire with pins. I used to run through the sheets with my arms outspread, pretending I lived in billowy, white hallways. And Mama laughed with me.
It never occurred to me that someone else’s mother might have scolded them for doing such a thing. Only later, when I saw Marianne Thompson’s mother berating her for getting the clean laundry dirty all over again, did I realize that Mama could’ve found fault with the fun I was having. How lovely that she didn’t.
The smell in the air on one particular sunny day was the honey-sweet of the neighbors’ lopsided lilac bush and the bite of the sun and the clean of detergent. I felt free because Mama seemed happy. I came to the end of the row and stood with the hem of a sheet draped over my messy curls, and Mama shook her head at me and said, “Jenny, you remind me of a bride.” Which made me stand straighter, even though I was little, because brides were always beautiful and tall.
“Were you a bride when you married Daddy?” I asked her.
Her fingers hesitated for a brief beat before she pinched the clothespin. “Yes, of course I was. I was a beautiful bride,” she said.
“Was Daddy handsome?”
“Yes, of course. He certainly was.”
“Is that why you married him? Because he was handsome?” I wrapped the sheet tighter around my head and began to hang on and twirl. I felt Mama’s hands close over my shoulders as she began to unwind me again.
That was the day she told me she married Daddy because he drove in circles around the high school for hours, insisting she have lunch with him. That was the day she told me she married him because he threatened to beat up any other boy in the school if he so much as talked to her.
She talked to me about my daddy that day, but I believe fear held her back then, too. For many days after that, I clung to her happiness. I remember loving how the sun smelled.
The elm tree outside Jean’s window had grown so tall that it rivaled the maple we used to climb in the front yard. Most of the time Jean didn’t let me come in her room, so when she did, I felt like I’d been invited to visit one of the most elite places in St. Louis. After my first week at Shaw Jewelers, Jean decided on a whim to let me in. She was sifting through piles of her movie magazines, showing me her favorite issues, when I noticed limbs jostling outside her second-story window. The tap tap tap on the glass window sent my pulse speeding.
“Oh.” Jean pushed her magazines aside and rose to her feet like this happened every day of the week.
“Who is that?” I hopped to my feet beside her, almost knocking over her bedside lamp. I caught the shade at the last minute to keep it from crashing to the floor.
“It’s just Billy.” She unlatched her window and slid it open. The boy who jumped inside was handsome, with earnest eyes, a dreamy square jaw, and sandy hair curling at his ears no matter how he’d tried to tame it with Brylcreem. He was wearing enough hair cream to asphyxiate everyone who lived in our flat, and then some.
Jean shoved her magazines back under her bed, made sure the cuffs of her jeans were rolled up tight, and slipped furtively into her sneakers. “We’re going out now and you can’t tell anybody,” she ordered me.
“What?”
“You heard what I said.”
If you counted on one hand all the things I knew about romance, you’d have at least three fingers left over. One thing I did know about love was this: Jean had never done anything like this before.
“Wait a minute.” I didn’t know exactly what I wanted her to wait for. I only knew if she left through the window and Daddy found out about it before she got home, I’d pay the price right along with her.
“Go to your room and read or something. Say you haven’t seen me if Daddy comes looking. That’s all you have to do.” She shot me an expression that would have curdled milk.
“Jean. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’m going now.”
“Jean, who is he?”
“I told you. Billy.”
“Billy Manning,” he said, following up for her, looking as uncomfortable as I felt, extending his hand.
I didn’t take his hand to shake it. I was too distraught for that. He stood by the window waiting while we discussed his attributes like he was a specimen.
“I met him at the Fox, okay? One afternoon when you couldn’t go because you were too busy working at your new job.” Then, exasperated because she knew I’d insist she give me every detail or I wouldn’t be satisfied, “It was that time I went to see Mogambo again, okay?”
Mogambo was the Grace Kelly movie about a woman who became dissatisfied with her life when she and her husband went on safari in Kenya. Grace was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for that one, and she should have been the winner, Jean often complained. It should never have been Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity. And of course, Jean told me, everyone thought Clark Gable must have fallen in love with Grace while they filmed the movie.
“It was the third time she’d seen it,” Billy volunteered.
I narrowed my eyes at him to make him be quiet. Of course she’d seen it three times. Every Grace Kelly admirer had seen it three times. To my sister I said, “You can’t just run like this.”
“You weren’t supposed to be here when Billy came anyway. He got here early.” She rolled her eyes at him, making it clear this was all his fault. “If you hadn’t been in here, you wouldn’t even know I’d taken off.”
“Yeah, but now I do.”
“I wasn’t going to tell anybody.” She slung her leg over the window ledge and grabbed onto a branch. She wasn’t taking anything with her, not her rhinestone-button sweater, not her purse, nothing.
“When will you be back?” I hissed.
“Maybe never.”
“Is there a phone where you’ll be?” I asked.
“No.”
“Where are you going, Jean?”
“I don’t have a place in mind.”
I clamped my mouth shut. Does he have a place in mind? I’d been planning to ask. But I stopped myself, it sounded so ridiculous. How odd was this? Me, acting like a mother.
Chapter Seven
All that night, the walls of our flat jeered and sputtered with sounds I’d never heard before: walls shifting, bricks hissing out the day’s heat like a sigh. I turned my pillow every so often, trying to find another cool spot. I gave up after a while and let it grow warm beneath my head. It couldn’t have cooled off more than a few degrees outside since the sun went down.
Every crack of brush outside made my heart pound. Every creak of the floor inside was even worse. What if Daddy missed Jean tonight?
I strained at the slightest hint of noise. A lizard slipping through the grass became a footfall I needed to listen for. A rustle in the tree became my sister coming home.
The sheets weighed a hundred pounds on my legs. I sat up in desperation and kicked them off. It cooled me a little, freeing my toes.
I’d figured Jean would stay out all night and I wasn’t wrong. I didn’t know which frightened me more, that Daddy woul
d figure things out or that my sister would come to some harm. Just before daybreak, I heard the stealthy scratch of Jean’s window rising. I slid low in my bed like I was sinking into a bathtub with relief.
Presently, “Jenny,” I heard her whisper at my door. She opened my door an inch, then lightly knocked, as if she suddenly thought I deserved privacy. “You awake?” As if I’d grown a little in Jean’s eyes just by association with her because, after this one night, she’d achieved her own pinnacle of maturity.
I felt limp with relief. “Come in,” I whispered back.
That was all the invitation she needed.
“I’ve got so much to tell you.” She sat down hard on my ankles, about wrenching them from the sockets. Her eyes, when she stared at my wall, looked way beyond what I could see. For once she wasn’t talking about Grace Kelly. She wasn’t going on about Grace’s trip to Cannes or about the filming of To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant or about how Grace had said the South of France was her favorite location. It was a rare moment when Jean forgot to talk about Grace Kelly and told me about herself instead.
“Do you want to know what we did? Do you? Do you?”
I clutched the sheet to my chin, feeling amused because, after all the times I’d begged her to let me know what was going on, I could see I wouldn’t be able to stop her now if I tried. “I didn’t think you wanted to tell.”
“We dust-bombed streetcars,” she gasped. “You scrape all the dust by the curb into a paper sack and swing it around your head and let it fly when the streetcar comes by. All the passengers start jumping around and coughing and dusting themselves off. Some of them are dressed so fine and they holler—”
Somewhere beyond her words, the faucet began to run. We both froze. From the kitchen, we heard the refrigerator door slam, the rumble of a chair scooting on the floor.
Jean looked like a trapped rabbit. “He’s up?”
I shook my head at her. I didn’t know.
“Has he been up all night?”
I clutched the sheets clear up to my chin. I sure couldn’t answer.
“I’ve got to get back to my room” is what she would have said if she’d had the time. But when she edged the door open and sidled out, I could see Daddy’s silhouette against the far wall. I knew then that her sidling out was exactly what Daddy had been waiting for.
Sometimes not knowing what to expect felt worse than getting belted. I listened to the surge of their quarreling voices with my head in defeat against the wall.
“Where’ve you been?”
“. . . in my room . . .”
“Don’t lie to me.”
I couldn’t see Daddy’s face, but I could imagine it. All twisted up like a rotted pear.
“You think I let anything in this house get by me? You think I didn’t hear what time you came in?”
We’d learned to be cautious around Daddy, picking out the right words like we’d pick the right change out of a coin purse. Daddy always needed to control what went on—when we went to bed, what time we had to get up. He decided what television programs we watched, how much money we spent, what clothes we wore, what we ate for supper. I cringed when I heard the flippant way my sister answered him. Billy must’ve gone to her head, made her feel too important. Jean forgot to be careful.
I couldn’t believe she’d lied outright to him. But then, in a fit of insanity, she told him the truth. “I met a boy and I was out with him,” Jean suddenly challenged. She sounded like she expected Daddy to be impressed. “He liked me.”
And just like that I heard something thunder across the floor and hit the wall. I heard her shriek—he must have grabbed her.
“Don’t you let any boy come close to you, do you hear me?” I heard his fist strike and knew he must have doubled her over.
“You being loose with boys, aren’t you?”
I heard her gasping for air.
“How many, Jean? How many have you had relations with?”
Another punch and, from the thud, he must have dropped her to her knees.
“Any boy gets close to you, I’ll kill him. You tell them to their faces for me, you hear?”
With sheets wadded beneath my chin, with fists trembling, I waited to hear another blow. The flat grew quiet, as still as all the other dwellings that crouched along Wyoming Street. Then, as if the sound came from very far off, I heard my sister sobbing.
Our lives are never going to be more than this.
“You tell this to any boy who so much as looks at you, Jean. You tell him you aren’t ever going to be free.”
Jean didn’t argue back anymore.
We’d learned never to argue back.
I pictured Daddy in the other room wiping the sweat off his upper lip with the heel of his hand. “You tell everyone who’s interested, you hear?” he said. “You girls belong to me.”
Miss Shaw decided to teach me the cash register. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on punching the right numbers, my fingers kept hitting the wrong keys. The only thing more frustrating than trying to prove you’re not good enough for a job is trying hard to do something right and messing it up.
When I tried to add tax to $53, the register kept ringing NO SALE. When I tried to make change for a $20 bill, I gave back $22. When I pulled the arm to open the drawer, it stayed stubbornly shut instead.
I stood morosely by the front window looking out, my fingers in my pockets, trying to pretend nothing was wrong. Daddy’s awful words resounded in my head. Never going to be free. The long night of listening for every crunch and clatter outside was taking its toll.
“Is that the one?” Miss Shaw asked.
She pointed at my palm. I looked down, too, not realizing I’d pulled it out. I tucked the penny away with false nonchalance. But not before she craned her neck to have a good look.
“You know what, Jenny?” she asked me. “The worst thing you can do is go into a day being afraid.”
“Afraid?” I asked. “Why would you think I was afraid?”
“I think you’re afraid that everything you do is the wrong thing. I think you’re afraid of all the good things you are.”
I’d learned to hold my tongue with my daddy. It wasn’t quite the same with everybody else. “I don’t know what makes you think that. You can’t think that—you’ve only known me inside your shop.”
“That’s one of the things about Jesus,” she said. “Once you know how to receive the love he’s pouring into your heart, then all of a sudden, out of the blue, you start knowing whom to give it to.”
My face shot up. It gave me a jolt, having Miss Shaw start talking about Jesus.
How did Miss Shaw know that, for one night, I believed all of Jesus’ promises? How could she know that I prayed the words at Aurelia’s church, but now I was starting to doubt I’d ever hear from him?
If there was anything I’d learned from Daddy, it was not to let anybody see me scared. He didn’t go easier on me if I didn’t let him see me afraid, but he didn’t quite get so much pleasure out of hurting me, either.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” I lied.
“Well, as long as you’re standing there, would you mind helping me rearrange the windows once we’re done here? I haven’t been happy with them in a while. Since that man grabbed those necklaces from my hand.” Then, “If not for you, Jenny Blake, I would’ve lost some expensive pieces.”
If not for the penny.
So here we came to the penny again. It seemed like every time I forgot about it, and about how many things had changed in my life since I picked it up, something came along to remind me again.
Miss Shaw draped a watch over the black velvet stand shaped like an arm. I draped another. The watch’s opalescent face and gold numbers glimmered against Miss Shaw’s glove. My hand looked small and grimy compared to Miss Shaw’s white gloves and perfect, refined gestures. I thought about how these timepieces were worth at least fifty times what Daddy kept hidden in the tin above the stove.
Miss Shaw
must’ve seen me noticing because she laid her gloved hand across mine. “You know what I think? I think your picking up that penny was more than part of a random chain of events. I think God was giving you a message. I think he wants you to know that he’s watching over you all the time, that he has a good plan for your life.”
My eyes shot to hers. “You’re talking about me?”
She nodded. “Sure, I am.”
“Why?”
She began tucking each price tag behind each band so if a customer was interested, he would have to inquire. She ran her fingers beneath each clasp so every one lay at the same angle.
“Just a hunch, I guess.” Miss Shaw slid the cabinet shut with a firm click. “You’re a pretty girl, Jenny. Mind if I try something?” She opened her palm to reveal a sparkling barrette.
I nodded. I mind. I didn’t want her experimenting with her fashion ideas on me. But she looked so disappointed, I yielded.
“Go ahead if you want. I don’t care.”
She slid my bandeau off and gathered my unruly hair in her fist. When her gloves brushed my neck, I got the goosebumps. I wasn’t used to anybody being careful when they touched me. I wasn’t used to anybody touching me in kindness at all.
“Here. Let me show you.” She fiddled with my bangs, slipped the barrette in place and gave me a hand up so I could look in the mirror. “If you sweep it to one side, look there.”
I stared at myself.
“Your eyes are the color of that penny you carry.”
All I could see in the mirror was my chewed-up lips and too many freckles and a nose that looked about as sharp as a spout on a coffee pot.
“Copper comes from the same ore as iron, did you know that? Do you see that iron strength in your eyes? I sure do.”