by Joyce Meyer
Jean must have saved up good from her summer baby-sitting, because when I tore open the little box from her, I found a pair of pearl earrings.
“They’ll hurt your ears,” she whispered when I hugged her. “I have a pair like them. But they shine real pretty.”
Stashed in a glass vase upstairs was the bright purple flower Aurelia had made me out of sheets of crepe paper. Out of all of us, Aurelia had been the one most excited about Christmas. She’d escorted me into her room days ago and whispered in low tones and carefully opened sacks to show me what she planned to give everyone.
She’d made all her best friends flowers, and she’d bought a new magnifying glass for Darnell. She’d bought a toy spaceship for Garland and a set of spatulas for Aunt Maureen.
Of all the things she’d purchased, though, she was most excited about what she’d gotten her daddy. She’d gone to Chesworth’s Music and bought Eddie Crockett sheet music, a vast assortment of it.
I knew he couldn’t play that without the aid of Mr. Lamoretti. Never mind his arm. “You must be crazy giving him that,” I said, hands planted on my hips.
“He likes to have it setting around the house, Jenny,” she assured me. “He wants T. Bone and Curtis and Chick to see it everywhere they go when they roam around here.”
I shook my head.
“He likes to think about what he’s going to do someday. It’s more for his spirit than anything.” As if that explained it all. And the more I thought about it, it did. It was just like Eddie Crockett. He liked to show everybody he was going to live his life whole even if a part of it had gotten broken.
I waited until last to give out my presents. I had spent hours at Miss Shaw’s because she’d insisted I use the shop’s wrapping paper for each of the small dimestore gifts I’d bought my family. When I pulled my packages out, we didn’t have anything left under the tree.
“Here, Mama.” I handed hers over and watched while she unwrapped a box of soaps. I’d known she’d “ooh” and “ah” over the Yardley Lilac fragrance.They smelled like the lilacs she snipped from our neighbor’s yard and snuck into the house every June. (“You want to steal the lilacs off your neighbor’s tree,” she’d say each year as she flitted upstairs still wearing her nylon bathrobe, clutching armfuls of blooms she’d cut with the kitchen scissors, “the best way to do it is in your nightgown. That way, nobody ever gets brave enough to stop you.”)
Next Jean unwrapped the eyelash curler I’d bought her from Woolworth’s, exactly like the one Miss Shaw had given me clear directions on how to employ. Jean was the one who could use eyelash-curler lessons now. I fully intended to take her through every step and send her back to secretarial school in total awe of me because I’d taught her to have the fashionable wide-eyed look.
When I handed Daddy his small box, I couldn’t keep my hand from shaking. I held my breath while he sliced the tape with his pocketknife and smoothed out each crease with his thumb. He lifted the lid off the box and frowned. My heart pounded like drumfire in my chest.
Daddy picked it up. “What’s this—a penny? This is all you gave me for Christmas?”
I questioned the decision again in my head: Lord, did I really hear you right? Isn’t this what you wanted me to do?
“Last summer I found a penny like this one, Daddy. And God used it to remind me how he wanted to change my life.” Then to my total surprise, out of my mouth came, “Maybe you don’t understand what you’ve been doing to us, Daddy.” I took a deep breath, mustering all my courage. “But without God intervening, my life would have been ruined.”
He went on talking as if he didn’t even hear me. “You have a job, for Pete’s sake,” he said. “You could have gotten me a new cigarette lighter. Now that, I needed.”
It made me cringe, but I touched his hand.
“No, Daddy.” My voice came out just as strong and firm as I could make it. “This is what you need.”
I told him the penny was important because it represented God’s truth.
“It started something new in me, Daddy. I’m hoping it might get you started on the same road.” I looked down at my shoes. “You probably hurt Jean and me, Daddy, because somebody hurt you. I’m giving you this penny in hopes that you’ll let God change you, too.”
Daddy looked at me like what I’d just said had blown a hole in his gut. The air in the room was thick with fear and anticipation. He set the penny in its small box beneath the tree, barely touching it, like it might burn him.
The penny sat there in its box until Mama took the tree down and folded up the quilted tree skirt. The penny sat there until the day the Grace Kelly stories started on television again.
From the minute Grace Kelly announced her engagement to Prince Rainier III, my sister acted like she’d personally been invited into a world of royalty. The announcement came in a special NBC news report right after the week’s presentation of The Philco Television Playhouse. Jean watched the story unfold on television that week, mesmerized, unable to turn away.
“There is nothing impetuous about this proposal,” Rainier repeated a dozen times into as many microphones as news correspondents hounded him for the story. “I think we are both ready for marriage.”
When the reporters grilled Grace Kelly’s mother for her part of the story, she beamed at the cameras.
“I knew then and there that his intentions were not just those of a smitten young man.” Mrs. Kelly spoke of her daughter with such pride that it made me want to cry. “There was purpose in every word and movement.”
“I am swept away,” Grace announced in her practiced diction, as camera bulbs exploded in her face and she never batted an eyelid. “I have been in love before, but never like this.”
“Can you imagine?” Jean breathed. “Marrying a real prince?”
“It’s hard to picture,” I admitted. “Living in a castle. Having everything done up just the way you like it. . . .”
Most nights while Jean was home from Lowman’s Secretarial School, she and I slept in the same bed. Most nights I’d give a light tap on her door, tactfully offering her a chance not to hear me. But she always heard me; she always guessed I might be coming. She left the door open a crack so I could push it open. And we’d lay side-by-side in amiable silence, our chests rising and falling to the same tempo, our pillows bunched up beneath our ears, our legs ending up tangled by morning. If either of us got up and leaned over the windowsill, we could see Daddy below on the stoop, in one of his regular foul moods, the tip of his Lucky Strike glowing red every time he took a draw on it. The air on those few nights seemed clear as watch-face glass with my sister at my side, quiet and intensified. Even from the bed I could almost hear Daddy sucking on his cigarette, releasing it with a pop. Since Christmas, Daddy’s mood had grown more sullen. I kept waiting for a response from him about what I’d given him as a gift, but none came.
Sometimes Jean would say, “I hate to go leaving you again.”
And I’d say, “I saw Billy Manning dust-bombing streetcars. He’s a real pest.”
She’d ask, “You going to be all right, Jenny?”
I’d whisper, “I think so. Yeah, I’m going to be okay.”
That night, because Grace Kelly had announced her engagement to a prince, I happened to think of a page from an issue of Movie Reel I’d brought home from Miss Shaw’s and saved for Jean.
“It’s a real good story,” I told her. “All about Grace’s parents being unhappy with her dating Oleg Cassini. I thought you’d like to read it, but maybe you wouldn’t. None of it matters anymore.”
“Oh, go get it,” she said, bopping my shoulder. “I want to read it. I really do.”
On hands and knees, I dug through my clothes until I found the bottom of the drawer. Just as my hand found the slick, thin pages, I froze. My stomach wrenched.
Daddy’s footsteps moved toward me in the hallway. The floor creaked. I heard him take another step, measuring his weight by degrees.
I felt like I would be sic
k.
Help me, please, Jesus. Don’t let it happen again.
The footsteps stopped outside my door. I rocked back on my heels. And waited.
I heard Daddy’s breathing on the opposite side of the door. I dared to rise, but when I did, the floor groaned.
Daddy’s stealth could mean only one thing. He’d gotten more cautious with Jean home. He waited to make certain no one heard anything.
Silently, I pressed my hands to the door. As if I stood any chance at all of holding it shut against him. I held my breath as the doorknob turned.
That’s the minute I figured something out. While I was wondering whether my prayers made any difference at all, God must have been working on Daddy’s heart even though I couldn’t see it.
That was the moment the door should have inched open.
Only it didn’t.
When Daddy’s steps moved on, I felt the blood drain from my head. I almost fainted with relief. Until the footsteps stopped again. Outside Jean’s room.
I panicked. I shouldn’t have left her. What had I been thinking?
I hadn’t decided what I was going to do yet. But I was onto him. Nothing Daddy could do or say could make me live in fear anymore. I listened to the One who loved me unconditionally and assured me he had a good plan for my life. The one who had been putting pennies in my path all along. I listened to Jesus saying, You watch out for those little reminders of me right in front of your face, and I’ll be the one to take care of all the big things. Always remember, I’m a step ahead of you, putting pennies in your path with my love, every place you end up walking.
Mama’s voice murmured something in the hallway. At first, I thought she’d finally come to stop him. But her voice came from too far away.
I cracked my door. Down the hall, Jean’s door stood ajar. I hadn’t latched it firmly behind me.
My parents’ words swept over me in waves of warning. I didn’t understand their meaning, but I knew the tone. Mama sounded frightened in a way I’d never heard her before.
“Now that we . . . But things have gotten . . . You said yourself . . .” And then Daddy hit her.
Jesus had been a step ahead of me all along, putting pennies in my path, and I knew which direction he intended me to walk now. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there. I don’t even remember how I made it up the hall.
I entered my parents’ bedroom and stood in the narrow space between the chest of drawers and the bedside table. I must have been only a shadow to them, a silhouette cast aside as the light from the headlights of a car moved along the street.
“Jenny?” Mama’s voice quavered hard. “Is that you?”
“Get on out of here,” Daddy said. “You got no place in here.”
I didn’t budge. Sometimes confronting somebody is the only way to overcome fear. That night I realized God doesn’t always make something go away because we pray. When we pray, he often gives us the strength to stand up to it.
I’d never been so scared in all my life. But I stood rooted. I heard a rustle of nightgown beside me and knew Jean had come, too. Her fingers reached for mine. I took them and squeezed.
Daddy advanced on us from where he’d been hanging on to Mama. “What are you two asking for? Get on out of here.”
Thank heaven for a dark so thick that he couldn’t see my knees shaking. Thank heaven I was done watching Mama handle our hurts by turning a deaf ear and blinding her eyes. Thank heaven Jean was standing beside me as a way of agreeing that it was time for the abuse to stop.
Somebody just needed to stand up, and that’s what I was doing.
Daddy’s voice dropped an octave. It rumbled low, ready to explode.
“You know what I’m capable of, don’t you? If you two don’t stop this, I’ll beat you senseless.”
Something new had taken me over. A determination I had never felt before and a fresh strength in my mind. Mama might have let Daddy hurt us—but I was not going to put up with it any longer. I wasn’t going to let him hurt Mama or Jean or me anymore.
The angrier Daddy got, the more brutal his words became. But they were only words without life, not like the ones surging forth like heart-music in my head, not like the words that had, at last, chased away my emptiness.
Fear not, for I am with you.
Jean’s hand held me in place.
The longer we took to respond, the more power drained out of Daddy’s cruel words.
A light came on in the Pattersons’ flat below, and our dark outlines changed direction on the wall.
I was finished holding my tongue. I spoke only once, and I knew it would be enough.
“Mama.”
In the splay of light, I saw terror flicker in her eyes as I called her. It must have scared her to death to understand how much we needed her. I saw the glimmer of guilt when she realized that, for years, she’d lacked the courage to do what my sister and I were doing now.
Daddy grabbed Mama when she angled herself away from him.
“No.” She rose. “It’s over. I won’t stand for it anymore.”
Daddy couldn’t win against the three of us. Maybe one alone, but not all of us together.
With his fingers, he ransacked his hair.
It’s not your fault what he did to you. Maybe that assurance should have come from my mama. Maybe someday it would. But for now, I heard it from a stronger place, a soul place I knew I could depend on.
Mama bundled us in her arms. Jean sobbed.
“I’m so sorry,” Mama whispered to us. “I’m so sorry.”
“We have to start somewhere, Mama.” My words were strong. Firm. Sure.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Since the streetcar line into downtown had been shut down and abandoned that winter, I had to ride a new city bus across town to view the Grace Kelly wedding newsreel that April. Me and Jean were both amazed how quickly the months had passed that winter, since I had stood up to Daddy and our lives had changed and my sister had gone back to Lowman’s Secretarial School. Jean saved up and rode a bus three hours from her school so we could see the Grace Kelly newsreel together. I’d never set foot on a city bus before, but the Hodiamont schedule told me what time to wait on the corner until it came, choking out rancid grey smoke as it growled toward me. The bus smelled like warm plastic and fresh leather and glue when I boarded. Its seats were so smooth, I slid into the lady next to me every time we swung a corner. I could tell that when summer came, the bus wasn’t going to be nearly as good as the streetcar for cooling off.
Jean waited for me beside the theater doors, her hat brim pulled low, my movie ticket already in hand. When we settled into the chairs at the theater that day, when my sister sighed in expectation, the feeling of rightness, of us beginning anew in different territory, rose right up and surprised me. I passed the popcorn to Jean. With all this sudden pleasure expanding in my stomach, there wasn’t room for much else.
Just then, the curtains drew apart. The theater darkened. A roaring lion filled the screen, and an anchorman’s resplendent voice announced we’d be viewing A Wedding in Monaco, the up-to-the-minute Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer newsreel about Her Serene Highness Princess Grace. Images flickered on screen, Jean squeezed my arm tighter, and suddenly, as we saw the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution, each of us might have been sailing across the ocean into Monaco Harbor to meet our princes, too.
Even though the reel was in black and white, I saw everything in vivid shades, and if you asked me years later, even then, I could still describe the colors of the water and the ship-captain’s jacket and the flags draped from the masts of the yacht.
Grace fielded reporters’ questions in the film with style and passion that left me breathless.
“Yes, I’m sad to be leaving home, but I’m thinking about being married, I’m happy about being married. Most every girl thinks about being married at times like this.”
“. . . Upon marrying His Highness, I will have dual citizenship.”
“. . . Yes, if we were to have child
ren, the same would hold for them as well.”
It would take two ceremonies, the newsreel touted, to unite Grace and her prince in royal matrimony. In a ceremony broadcast to all of Europe, eighty carefully selected members of immediate family and friends were allowed in the throne room of the Palace of Monaco to witness the civil ceremony. During the forty-minute service, Grace wore a pale pink taffeta suit and white kid gloves, the couple exchanged vows in French, the national language of Monaco, and Grace listened to the recitation of her new 142 official titles, counterpoints of Rainier’s own.
I conveniently forgot to “tsk tsk” Jean about placing more stock in somebody else’s life than she did in her own. I understood why my sister did it. I listened to every detail about the regal ivory gown, which had been created under top-secret conditions. I imagined myself in the fitted bodice of Brussels lace, my prayer book and shoes glistening with seed pearls. I pictured how I’d hold my head high in the Juliet headpiece with the tiny row of orange blossoms, and the round veil made from some ninety yards of tulle and a constellation of pearls, specially designed so the vast audience could see the bride’s face.
Finally, because of Miss Shaw and Aurelia, I was beginning to understand the truth. The one prince who cared for me more than his own life wanted to take me by the hand and make me whole.
Jean and I sat in the audience together long after the orchestra music swelled and the credits ran and the curtains drew together. We knew that from now on, when we saw Grace Kelly, we would watch her in a different way. Both of us had our own lives to begin living now.
Something had ended. Something had begun. My sister looked at me and smiled as the theater lights blinked on. She took my hand and, together, we squinted, our eyes adjusting to the light as we made our way out into the golden sun.
Even though everyone kept asking me whether Miss Shaw had her hair styled at Rogier’s Salon (which is where Debbie Reynolds had gotten hers done on the way through town), or whether she’d purchased her latest pocketbook on the third floor of Sonnenfield’s, or whether she used thirty-weight oil in her convertible to keep it running so smoothly, I noticed with pleasure how the neighbors had started asking her questions directly, too.