“That’s ruined, you know.” She sounded like a whiny child. I turned to her with a blank face.
I said, “I hadn’t planned to eat it. Would you rather I not clean it up?”
Her chin lifted so high I could see up her nose. “No. You made the mess, you can just clean it up yourself.” I half expected her to stamp her foot. “And when you’re done, you can just cook dinner to replace the one you ruined.” She flounced out of the room about as well as a forty-year-old woman can flounce. I went back to wiping and wringing.
When the kitchen was back to square one, I took stock. The chair I’d flung had missed the pot of water boiling for spaghetti. That was a start. I dumped a box of macaroni into it and halfway replaced the lid. Then I turned on the oven and started pulling stuff out of the refrigerator.
Miss Lydia had taught me how to make a white sauce one day and promised it would come in handy. If you can make a white sauce, she’d said, you can make gravy, creamed vegetables, chowders—all sorts of things.
Ten minutes later I had a tuna noodle casserole in the oven and had put some canned peas on to simmer. I mixed up some biscuits and rolled them out on newspaper spread across the table. We didn’t need the extra starch with the macaroni, but my parents had never had the biscuits Miss Lydia had taught me how to make and I knew they were a long sight better than Mama’s.
It was cooking with a vengeance. That doesn’t paint me in the best light, but at the time it seemed as mature as Mama was acting. I could hear the TV blaring and I would have bet she had her nose stuck in a book as well. Whatever it took to tune me out.
Daddy went on and on about how good dinner was. You could almost see Mama’s blood pressure rising point by point. When he reached for a third helping of casserole and a fourth biscuit and asked, “Why haven’t you ever made it like this before?” she finally spewed.
“I didn’t make it. She did, after she ruined the dinner I made.” She jerked her head in my direction.
Daddy studied my face and frowned. He hadn’t looked at me since he’d come in. Now he said, “What’s that on your cheek?”
“I got burned,” I muttered.
“Well, boy, I guess you did!” Good food always made him friendlier. “How on earth did you manage that?”
I counted to four before Mama exploded. “I slapped her smart mouth, that’s how!”
Daddy sat with his fork in midair and looked back and forth between us. “Slapped her with what?” he asked, but he was looking at me.
“What was handy,” Mama told him. “It just happened to be the spoon I was stirring spaghetti sauce with.”
Daddy put down his fork and sat back in his chair, taking in a wider picture. “What did you say to her?” Now he was talking to me but looking at Mama.
“Listen to me a minute,” I said.
“Okay.”
“No. That’s what I said. ‘Listen to me a minute.’ ” It was tattling, sure. But if tattling didn’t feel so good people wouldn’t do nearly so much of it, and just then I felt like singing it. In three-part harmony, all by myself.
Daddy stared at each of us in turn, then told Mama, “We’ll talk about it later.” To me he said, “And you, if you’re finished, go to your room.”
Like I’d had other plans.
Chapter Eight
T he next morning I almost jumped out of my skin when I walked into the kitchen and found them sitting in the same chairs. I hadn’t seen them both at the breakfast table since winter. There were coffee mugs in front of them and Mama looked like she had either slept too hard or done some serious crying.
Daddy cleared his throat and said, “Sit down, please.” I slid into my chair. “Your mother is concerned.” Mama kept her head down.
I sneaked a look. He was speaking for her now? He went on. “Don’t you think it’s . . . well, unwise to spend time with an old woman addled enough to take her own boy for a prowler?”
I concentrated on my hands. “Oh, as long as I don’t wait till the whole town’s been gone a month and then try sneaking into her house at three in the morning, I imagine I’ll be safe,” I told him.
Mama pounced. “What’s wrong with you that you can’t spend time with girls your own age, anyway?” she said.
A few weeks earlier I would have winced. “Nothing’s wrong with me,” I told her. “The only two girls around who are my age live about eight miles away. Plus they’re tight as ticks. And even if they did want me in their little club, would you drive me out to their farms all the time?”
She took the bait. “I’m not your taxicab.” I had heard that often enough.
“Didn’t say you were. Just answering your question.”
“I guess what your mother and I don’t understand is why. Why do you want to be around an old woman like that?” Daddy looked honestly perplexed.
I didn’t mean to, but I started laughing. Then tears sprang to my eyes and I just overflowed all over. I wiped my face on my T-shirt sleeve when I could and said, “She’s my friend.”
Mama sucked her teeth and shook her head at Daddy like this had proved something.
I concentrated on breathing. It seemed like I could forget to. The eye of the storm was coming back.
I made my face blank. “She talks to me,” I said. “She listens to me. She teaches me things. How to cook, how to crochet, how to fix stuff.” I took a deep breath. “She likes me.”
“Your mother can do all those things with you, can’t she?” Daddy’s face was so drawn in on itself it looked like a fist.
“Miss Lydia enjoys it,” I said.
“Oh, but—” Daddy started. Then he looked at Mama and whatever he saw stopped him. His eyes came back to me and, for the first time that morning, I remembered the big red splotch on my cheek. I stared at the sugar bowl. From the corner of my eye I saw him study my face.
Several minutes passed with no more said. I got up and slid my chair into place, went to my room and closed the door. I got dressed, then rummaged in the top drawer of my desk for the stationery I’d gotten for Christmas. I took out a piece and wrote in my most careful hand.
Dear Miss Lydia,
You can ask me anything and tell me whatever you want, too. We can talk about anything under the sun you think needs to be talked about, as far as I’m concerned. You are not alone, either.
XOX,
Love,
Billie Marie
I folded it in thirds and slid it into an envelope. I wrote her name on the front, sealed it, and laid it on the sewing machine next to the door so it was ready to grab on my way out. Just then I heard doors slam out in the driveway, one-two, and gravel crunched as the pickup drove away. I opened the door and helped myself to a great big breath of their air.
I thought the two hours doodling with makeup had produced a perfect result. I guess the sun had some harsh thoughts otherwise, though, because Miss Lydia jumped when she opened the door. I was afraid she’d get tangled up in the throw rug and fall. I grabbed her elbow just in case.
“Lands, child,” she said. She pulled away like I was something from the circus. “What on earth have you done?”
It’s hard to make eye contact with someone who looks horrified at your appearance. I went to the sink and started washing my hands just for something to do. “Mama hit me with the spaghetti spoon.”
“Whatever for?” she gasped.
“I tried to tell her something and she didn’t want to listen. That’s pretty much it.”
She was quiet for so long. I finished drying my hands and had no choice but to face her. “This have anything to do with me?” She looked at me so fiercely I couldn’t pull my eyes away.
“Oh no, Miss Lydia. Not at all.”
She was glaring out from under her eyebrows. “Are you sure?”
“Well, Mama might tell you something different, but as far as I’m concerned this had absolutely nothing to do with you and everything in the world to do with Mama,” I told her.
Miss Lydia deliberated a
long minute, then nodded. “I made pot roast,” she said.
Halfway through the meal she asked, “So underneath all that Cover Girl, what exactly you got goin’ on?”
“Some of it may be a bruise by today, but mainly it’s a burn.”
“You put anything on it besides makeup?”
I shook my head.
She nodded and started telling me about some real-life drama she’d read about in the new Reader’s Digest.
After the dishes were put away, she told me to go to the big bathroom upstairs and wash my face clean. I didn’t want to, but she said something about having seen worse no matter how bad it was. And it did seem silly trying to hide what she knew was there.
When I walked back into the kitchen she got out the poultry shears and cut a big tentacle off a plant in the windowsill above the sink. A clear gel starting oozing out the cut end. When she came at me with some on her fingers, I took a couple of steps backward.
She chuckled. “Aloe vera, Billie Marie. Main ingredient in some of the most expensive skin cream you can buy and that’s watered down. Best thing in the world for burns. That’s why I keep it in the kitchen.”
I winced at her touch. Then I was amazed by how cool the stuff felt as she spread it across my cheek. It looked like it should be sticky, but it wasn’t. It was just cool and soothing. I shut my eyes.
“Uh-huh,” Miss Lydia agreed. “You take that plant with you when you go, and use some every night and morning until that heals.”
“Oh, I can’t—” But that’s as far as I got. I could see her mind was made up.
Mama was making pot roast when I got home that evening and didn’t turn around as I took the plant to my room. I guess Daddy had dropped her off and gone on to run some errand, because the truck pulled in a little later. I heard Daddy tell Mama hello and figured that was dinner call.
He nodded at me without breaking his running commentary about the cultivator breaking down that afternoon. She stood at the stove murmuring at the appropriate junctures.
When she turned, she had filled a plate with food. She grabbed a knife and fork off the table and left the room without a word. A minute later we heard the TV come on. Daddy and I looked at each other. He shrugged and made a plate from the pots on the stove and then sat down at the table with the morning’s newspaper.
I weighed options while I filled my own plate. Then, carrying it in one hand and a glass of water in the other, I left Daddy with the paper and walked to the living room. Mama wasn’t so much watching TV as glaring at it. I kept on walking and ate my dinner behind my closed bedroom door.
And that’s how we ate from then on, in three separate rooms, no tie left to tether us to the kitchen table.
As I passed through the living room with my empty plate after that first silent dinner, the phone rang. Mama’s expression didn’t register any change, so I went over and grabbed it on the second ring.
“Thank you.” It was Miss Lydia. It took me a minute to remember the note I had slipped in with her mail.
“Sure. I meant it.”
“I know you did, Billie Marie, and I thank you. Now, is your mama there?”
I nearly choked. “Oh, no—well, I mean yeah, but—” Talk about a disaster just waiting to happen.
Miss Lydia chuckled and said, “Oh, lands, child, don’t worry. I got some business with her that’s got nothin’ to do with you.”
“Mama?” I had to say it three times before she pulled her eyes away from the screen and frowned at me. “It’s for you.”
“Who is it?”
“Miss Lydia,” I said and, when that news registered, she looked downright scared. I had to move for her to get to the phone, and I took the opportunity of being on my feet to get out of Dodge.
I took my plate to the kitchen and washed it. Then I washed it again. I was very, very thorough.
Mama leaned against the kitchen doorjamb a couple of minutes later. “I never would’ve dreamed,” she said to Daddy.
“Hmmm?” He was still glued to the paper.
“It was Lydia Jenkins.” That got his attention. “She doesn’t have anybody to take her to town now that Curtis is . . . gone, and she asked if I would.”
“When?” Daddy frowned.
“From now on, I guess.” The two of them stared at one other like they’d just dug up a body in the backyard and were each trying to decide if the other had put it there.
Chapter Nine
T he next day I waited for Miss Lydia to tell me about her conversation with Mama, but we passed the midday meal chitchatting about nothing in particular. We were washing dishes before she got serious, and then the subject wasn’t what I’d expected.
“Billie Marie?” she said. “We’ve agreed we can talk about anything needs to be talked about, haven’t we?”
Of course we had. “Uh-huh, sure.”
“Then I have to ask. Have you started getting your monthlies yet?” She was staring out the window at her garden.
My first thought was magazine subscriptions. Why would she ask about that? I hadn’t subscribed to anything since Highlights when I was a little goober. Then, ohhh. Of course. I shook my head. “No, not yet. Why?”
“Your mother has told you where babies come from, hasn’t she?” Her voice shook a little.
“Well, yeah,” I said, remembering that awful morning with Mama all red-faced and stammering, getting mad at me because she had to talk about it at all. “Sort of.”
Miss Lydia took me by the shoulders. “No ‘sort of’ about it, child. Either she did or she didn’t.”
I could feel a pulse in my ears, pounding out a warning. “Well, she told me about the egg and how if it’s not fertilized, the stuff gets passed once a month and what to do . . .”
“Billie Marie.” I’d never seen Miss Lydia so sober. “Did she tell you how the egg gets fertilized?”
“Well, no, but—” But all of a sudden I did know. And then there was a freight train inside my head and I saw a big dark spot like I’d stared too long at the sun and, as my knees buckled, I was thinking oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god-the-joke-that-man-that-comment-that-look-this-is-what-they-meant-but-Mama-and-Daddy-and-Miss-Lydia-and-Mister-Jenkins-and-oh-my-God-oh-my-God-everybody-who-has-ever-had-a-baby-that-awful-that-awful-it-wasn’t-just-it-wasn’t-just-Miss-Lydia’s-father-and-then-Curtis-inherited-this-terrible-idea.
Miss Lydia’s face was only a couple of inches from mine when I opened my eyes and I could see myself reflected in her glasses, scared and small, same as I felt. When I realized I was on the floor, I raised up so fast we banged heads and bounced apart like a couple of stooges, but neither of us laughed.
She steadied herself against the counter while I got my feet under me. I spoke first. “Do you think . . . I mean, are you saying . . . oh, Miss Lydia, do I have a baby inside me now?”
It sounded ridiculous out loud. Mama didn’t even let me wear a training bra yet, even though I needed one. It hadn’t been that long since I’d packed away all my Barbie stuff.
If I had a baby in me—it came all at once—then everybody would find out. I had to lay my cheek against the cool Formica counter in front of me.
“Aw now, child,” Miss Lydia started. I heard it catch in her throat. Calling me “child.” She was trying to stay calm, but her hands were shaking a lot worse than usual. “I seriously doubt it. I really, really do. But I had to ask. . . .”
I had a jumble in my head and was trying to fit the pieces together. “But . . . if I haven’t gotten the curse yet, is it possible?”
“Billie Marie! It’s hardly a curse!”
“Well, that’s what Mama calls it,” I said.
Miss Lydia shook her head like she felt sorry. “Well, you call it whatever you want, but that mama of yours is somethin’ else.”
But she wasn’t thinking about Mama. It looked more like she was trying to remember the combination to a safe she hadn’t opened in years. She blew out a lungful of exasperation.
“I don�
��t know.” She was matter-of-fact, like I had asked if we were going to have a white Christmas that year. “It doesn’t seem like it would work that way, but I just don’t know. It’s a whole lot easier to find out you’re not expecting early on than if you are.”
“So what do I do?” My chin started quivering. I couldn’t make it stop.
“Lemme think on it.”
I had an inspiration. “Is there something I can do, something I can take, I mean, to make sure it doesn’t, didn’t, happen?”
“NO!” Miss Lydia started out of her chair and I jumped. “Oh, lord, no, child, no. Don’t you even begin to think about hurting your body in any way, shape, or form. Just put that outta your mind this instant.”
“I just thought . . . maybe there was some easy way. . . .” Just thought. Just wished. Just hoped. Just make it go away.
Miss Lydia’s mouth twisted up like she’d bitten into something sour. “If there was, wouldn’t anybody have a baby they hadn’t planned on, now, would they?”
Oh. Of course. That girl who went away to take care of a sick aunt for six months. The other one who gave birth to a nine-pound “preemie” seven months after her wedding. All the women who were married up all nice and tidy and still liked their kids about as much as canker sores.
“So what do I do now? Just wait to see if my stomach starts growing?” I felt light-headed.
Miss Lydia shook her head. She looked a little cross. “I said, ‘lemme think on it.’ ” I didn’t see how I was going to think about anything else until I knew for sure.
I sat up straight as a yardstick and gasped. “I fainted!”
“Yeah?” She frowned.
“Well, on TV, that’s always the first sign somebody’s going to have a baby. That’s how you know.” I felt cold.
Miss Lydia smiled for the first time since the subject had come up. “Well, now, honey, that’s TV. You just can’t believe everything you see on it. Besides, that’s men writin’ about woman things for you.”
Oh. I had no problem with the difference between fact and fiction, but I’d always thought even fiction was based on something true. I hadn’t thought about anybody just plain getting it wrong.
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