Sometimes it was hard to digest that this was the same world we were living in. Today. It seemed so far away. But then we read about four little girls in Birmingham who went to church one day in 1963 and never came home and we were so ashamed we cried.
One of those afternoons I asked Miss Lydia if there were a lot of colored people in Sedalia when she was growing up.
She frowned. “Some. Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Mama and Daddy talk about the colored like they’re scared of them or something. I was just wondering how you got to think the way you do.”
She was standing at the kitchen sink and her weight slumped against the counter while she stared out the window a long minute. Then she said, “There on that timeline, the year after the Civil War ended, my daddy was born. His daddy fought that war. Fought for the side of the South.”
She took her glasses off and polished them on her apron. Buying time to shop for words. “As a child, Billie Marie, I heard him tell stories that made my stomach churn,” she said. “Granddaddy liked to call himself a religious man, but I didn’t know how to come home from church and reconcile myself to the things some folks thought they had a right to do to other people. Flesh and blood. Men, women, and children—pieces of property and not treated with the kindness you’d show a dog.” She bit her lip and said, “There is a kind of man in the world that gets meanness confused with power and I still can’t reconcile that.”
She wasn’t talking just about her granddaddy. I knew. That day in July she had told me there was something wrong with the men on that side of the family and called herself worse than Typhoid Mary for passing it on.
And I understood that part of what she was teaching Harlan and me—and why—was to make up for it.
School itself was still a joke but at least now it was one I shared. Harlan and I breezed through our class work. Then we read the biographies and novels Miss Lydia brought us from town. If it was a book she hadn’t read she asked us to work together on a report and pretended it was so she could learn too, but I knew it was mainly to get us to discuss and decide what was important.
She read everything we wrote and prodded us to go just a little bit farther with everything we studied. It wasn’t enough to tell her the who, what, and when. She asked for the why—and if that was impossible to know, she asked for our thoughts on the matter. Harlan and I learned to argue without getting mad, and it practically became a hobby.
That woman had a knack for asking the one question that could nail you to the spot and make you question everything you thought you’d decided. If we said the demonstrators at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention were unpatriotic, she asked us which parts of the First Amendment we’d keep and what we’d throw out. If we hollered “police brutality” against any of the protestors anywhere, she asked us to define at what specific moment and with what qualification a demonstration becomes a riot. She made us look at both sides of everything.
Just like when she’d figured out how to teach me to crochet, she was a natural.
I was learning a lot from Harlan and Miss Lydia that didn’t come from books, too. I learned more about kindness than I ever had at church. Kindness and generosity.
Harlan’s mom turned forty-five that February and he and his sisters planned a surprise party. The youngest girl was off at college and the older two were married with little kids and lived at least sixty miles away, so it was hard for the whole family to get together anymore, sometimes even for Christmas. This party was a month in the planning.
Harlan’s dad pitched in by getting Mrs. Willits out of the house that Saturday afternoon. When Harlan got his film developed, he showed me the picture he took right when his mother walked in and saw the decorations and all her little chicks home to roost. It made me cry. I had never seen such pure joy. I didn’t know you could take a picture of love. For me it was like peeking through a window at a different way to live.
When school let out that spring, I was lost. It wasn’t the same anymore with just Miss Lydia and me day after day. It was like feeling phantom pain from an amputated limb.
And I know it was hard on Harlan. Neither he nor I had been big phone talkers up until that point, but we started logging at least half an hour on the telephone with each other every day.
Then he showed up at Miss Lydia’s one day toward the end of June in a dilapidated old pickup. A big grin smeared across his face. I was so happy I couldn’t stop wiggling.
Harlan was one boy who didn’t have to ride a tractor every spare minute—his folks had both inherited a fair bit of land and that gave his dad the luxury of hiring outside help. But Harlan did have chores—mainly tending the five or so kinds of animals they always had around the homestead waiting to become dinner. He told us he hadn’t been able to get done every morning in time to ride with his mother on her schedule.
But his father had decided he could drive the five miles into Cumberland and back as long as he kept to dirt roads and only came for the afternoons. Mr. Willits was afraid all the work Harlan had done for Miss Lydia would come undone over a summer of neglect.
Right.
Harlan’s folks were about as kind and decent as they come. I barely knew them directly—they didn’t belong to our church, so I only saw them at school programs or the occasional funeral—but I’d heard Harlan’s stories. And I knew what kind of boy they’d turned out.
We spent most of that summer cleaning Miss Lydia’s house top to bottom, inside and out. We took down curtains and rehung them washed and pressed after the windows were clean. We beat rugs over the clothesline until we were choking on dust. We polished furniture. We scrubbed floors on our knees and then waxed them until we could see our reflections.
For her part Miss Lydia ran the best restaurant in town, open anytime we got hungry. And she still insisted on paying us a dollar a day.
Mostly we took a break from studying—but sometimes we couldn’t help getting caught up in what was going on. On July 16 Harlan came early to watch Apollo 11 lift off live on TV. We had seen rocket ships take off before, but this was a much, much bigger deal.
Four days later we parked ourselves in front of Miss Lydia’s TV at noon and by the time 3:18 rolled around and Neil Armstrong told us “The Eagle has landed,” my butt muscles were sore from being clenched. We could hear the cheering of the men at Houston Control, but Harlan’s watch ticking was the only sound in that room with the three of us.
We listened all afternoon while Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra explained what was going on and sometimes we heard the conversation between the moon—the moon!—and Houston. All three of us were afraid we’d miss something if we so much as went to the bathroom.
I didn’t know how they could get the TV picture to us from space, but Miss Lydia explained about satellites and signals and made me understand about as well as I understood how music came out of the radio. Then she took off her glasses and dabbed at her eyes and I asked her what was wrong.
“Nothing, child,” she said. “I just never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“Why not?” I asked her. “This space race thing has been going on since way back when Kennedy was president. You told us yourself.”
Miss Lydia chuckled, but not like she was laughing at me. “Billie Marie, you got to realize,” she said, “when I was your age I rode a mule to school. Only the richest men owned automobiles, and even they still called them ‘horseless carriages.’ You and Harlan here”—he tore his eyes away from the screen to listen—“will never have to worry about polio, but you’re just about the first crop that didn’t. That’s a fear I lived with most of my life.” She wiped her eyes again with the back of a wrist. “Now here I sit with cars buzzing up and down the street, thousands of people traveling by airplane over the country at this very minute, and I’m about to watch a man walk on the moon. It’s almost too much to take in.”
Harlan and I looked at each other and I wondered if my eyes were opened as wide as his.
&nb
sp; He called his mom when he knew she’d be home from work and asked if he could stay late. He had pulled the phone cord all the way into the living room next to me so I heard when she said, “Well . . . let me talk to Miss Jenkins, would you?”
The phone wouldn’t reach so I helped Miss Lydia hoist up out of her chair and take a few stiff steps toward the kitchen. “Hello,” she said, then, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I think that’s a fine idea. No, no, don’t worry. It’s just fine.”
She handed the phone back to Harlan and I heard his mother say “Behave yourself. I love you” and Harlan said, “I love you, too, Mom.”
It sounded so normal. I was amazed.
Harlan hung up and raised his eyebrows at Miss Lydia. “Your mama asked if I’d kick your butt out early enough in the morning to go do your chores,” she told him. “I promised her I would. So settle in. You’re staying the night.”
I stewed and squirmed until my folks pulled into their driveway about nine, and I called as soon as they were in the house. Daddy answered and I talked way too fast. “They’re just about to walk on the moon and we’ve been watching all afternoon and please can I stay? Please?”
I heard him sigh. He said in a tired voice, “Ten o’clock.”
“Oh, but Daddy I don’t know how much more there’ll be and it’s not like there’s school tomorrow—”
“I said ‘ten o’clock.’ ” No louder, no edge. No room for bargaining, either. I told him okay.
A few minutes later none of us blinked as that grainy gray guy in the fat space suit bounced down those steps. Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” fell on us like a prayer. We helped Miss Lydia up when “The Star-Spangled Banner” started and we were all three standing there bawling by the end. We knew each other’s minds well enough by then not to bother feeling stupid about it.
Out in the middle of nowhere, we were connected by live television transmission to the brotherhood of man. And in that one little room the three of us were connected to one another by something even stronger than blood.
At ten o’clock Miss Lydia followed me to the door and asked in a low voice, “You have the ruby pin these days, right?” I nodded and she said, “Do me a favor and pin it to your nightgown tonight.” She pinched my cheek and I managed a smile as she closed the door with Harlan on her side of it.
Our house was dark and my parents were in bed when I let myself in. I walked through the living room and put my hand on top of the TV. It was cold.
I knew my parents had to work hard. But it seemed to me just then they could make time to look up if they wanted to. If not at me, at least. At the world outside.
For the first time, I felt sorry for them that they weren’t me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I t couldn’t be avoided forever. By early August we had cleaned every inch of Miss Lydia’s house except behind that one closed door and there was just no plausible explanation to give Harlan for wanting to skip it. Besides, I figured it would have to be dealt with someday, and better us than Miss Lydia.
I had myself believing it wouldn’t bother me. But as soon as I stepped inside, it smelled like Curtis. All sweat and cigarette smoke. It was over ninety degrees in there and I started shaking like a barefoot Christmas caroler.
Harlan asked what was wrong. I couldn’t look at him. I kept trying to clear my throat but couldn’t get past a phlegmy gargling sound. Sweat started running out of my hairline into my eyes and even so I was shaking hard enough to rattle my teeth. The smell of the room turned into a taste in my mouth.
Harlan asked if I was getting sick. I shook my head. Then I reconsidered and shrugged. I reached back to steady myself against the headboard of the bed then pulled my hand away like I’d been burned.
I could see Harlan out of the corner of my eye. He bowed his head and clasped his hands down low in front the way men pray at church.
Without saying anything more, he took me by the shoulders and propelled me out of the room and down the stairs. Miss Lydia was in her chair in the front room staring at a television that wasn’t turned on.
Harlan steered me to the end of the sofa nearest her chair. He walked to the doorway and looked back and forth between the two of us half a dozen times, studying us for what seemed like an hour. He spent some time after that studying his shoes.
Then he said, “You know, Miss Lydia, it’s such a pretty day it’s a shame for us all to be inside. You keep saying your iris bed needs to be thinned out and I know my mom would love to have some. Could you maybe show Billie Marie where to dig?”
I don’t believe in love at first sight. It might make for an easy shortcut if somebody’s writing a movie, but in real life I think it’s nothing more than hormones performing a parlor trick. I have come to believe that real love is like learning to read, one letter at a time, sounding things out until it all comes together. It takes time to build, step after step. And I know that was the exact moment Harlan climbed up that first step for me.
He must have worked like a dervish, because he was finished by our usual parting time. The bed of his old pickup was filled with plastic garbage bags. You could smell a mix of pine cleaner and Glade wafting down the stairs.
He said, “Miss Lydia, unless you’ve got other plans, I’ll just take all those bags of clothes home and have Mom drop them off at Goodwill tomorrow.”
She had to clear her throat to mumble, “You’re a good one, son.”
I did the same before whispering, “Yeah. Yeah, you sure are.”
It was impossible to tell whether he was happy or horrified. He turned beet-purple, nodded, and left.
That night, Curtis raped me over and over again in my dreams. I would wake up drenched in sweat. Feeling actual pain. It would take forever to calm down and get back to sleep.
Then my head would hit that lunchroom floor and it would start all over.
About the fourth or fifth time, just before Curtis could wrestle my panties off, Harlan came running into the lunchroom with a big gun and chased Curtis off.
You don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.
Miss Lydia looked almost as haggard as me the next day and I figured her night hadn’t been any better. Harlan showed up with a guitar—I hadn’t even known he played—and after lunch he insisted we sing all the songs we knew. Even “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and baby stuff like that. Before we knew it Miss Lydia and I were laughing our heads off.
He was starting to flat-out astound me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
G oing back to school in September was barely a bump in the road. I didn’t look forward to it like Christmas, but there was no reason to dread it either.
KarenDebbie came back to seventh grade with their skirts even shorter, makeup even thicker, and their hair bleached to a brassy gold. They looked uneasy when they said hello to me and I couldn’t tell if they were unsure of themselves or me. I didn’t care. I could barely believe I had ever thought they mattered.
The boys in our class all came back about three inches taller. Their faces had erupted in angry pimples. They bounced off the walls like Labrador puppies—it was almost like somebody had put something in their water.
The eighth-grade girls huddled and giggled and kept to themselves—other than trying to distract the eighth-grade boys from staring at KarenDebbie.
Harlan had spent the last two weeks at home helping his mother, so it had been that long since I had seen him. Mrs. Willits planted a gigantic garden every year, probably an idea left over from having four kids at home, and she had taken time away from her job late August to fill the pantries and freezers.
When I laid eyes on Harlan that day he looked like he’d grown an inch. His face was starting to sprout fuzz but his skin was clear. Amid those other train wrecks he looked handsome. But when you care about somebody it seems like they automatically gain about twenty points in the looks department. Maybe he was plain as ever and I just couldn’t see it anymore.
Our tea
cher, a Mr. Landis, didn’t look old enough to be out of high school. Ten minutes after the bell rang we knew his deal. He had graduated college the spring before with a degree in economics. The only reason he had applied for this job was to stay out of the draft.
Harlan and I exchanged a look that said we were going to be on our own another year.
Now we had twice-a-day study hour instead of recess. Mr. Landis said he wanted us to keep our Constitution study partners from the year before and use one of those hours for extra concentrated work. It was starting to look like Cumberland C. P. was under a lot of pressure to have us pass that test at year’s end. There must have been government money involved for them to care so much.
Harlan raised his hand and asked if we could use both study hours every day if we thought we needed them. Mr. Landis said that would be fine. It took extra-concentrated work on my part not to laugh.
Miss Lydia called her own school to session the same week the bogus real one started and announced that, besides the day-to-day news, we were going to focus on the women’s movement, women’s lib.
I was thoroughly and utterly appalled—the conversations I’d overheard at home about hairy-legged bra burners were even more acid than those about colored people. I hadn’t formed an independent opinion of my own yet, but I knew without any consideration whatsoever that I didn’t want to be discussing bras around Harlan. Or any body parts that needed shaving.
I said, “No, Miss Lydia, you can’t just decide that. I, for one, won’t do it!” and felt darned proud I was confident enough to put my foot down.
She shot me a look so hot I could almost smell my hair burning. It caught me by surprise, to say the least. I took a step back and, by reflex, put up my hands and said, “Hey, okay! Don’t shoot! I’m sorry!”
She blinked a couple of times and then broke out laughing. I was staring at my bedroom ceiling later that night before I realized just what I’d said.
I was so mortified I decided I couldn’t even bring it up to apologize. Harlan hadn’t said anything, but it was hard to know if it hadn’t kicked him in the gut or if he was too decent to say so.
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