Billie Standish Was Here

by Nancy Crocker

  I went back the next afternoon a most eager and willing pupil in the subject of women’s lib.

  I hadn’t kept up with all the news that summer but now there were almost as many women’s demonstrations and marches on TV as there were protests against the Vietnam War. I had to admit it was a current event hard to ignore.

  But I still wasn’t sure I could discuss all the issues—birth control and abortion and such—with Harlan in the mix. I tried to squirm off the hook by saying he couldn’t possibly be interested.

  He looked at me with those big blue eyes that looked darker every day and said, “You think I don’t care about my sisters? You think I don’t care what happens to you?”

  I think I melted some just about then.

  It turned out there was plenty to go around when it came to making us uncomfortable. First off, it felt a lot more personal than when we were studying civil rights. Then we had been reading about people who were very different from us in places far away. They had problems we personally would never have to face.

  But there was no way to remove our own families from discussions about the roles men and women play. It was a subject that knocked on everybody’s door, that walked right on into everybody’s house no matter who they were.

  It set us talking about everyone we knew. A lot of the wives worked now, and that seemed like a fairly recent development once it came up for consideration. But none of us knew of a single man who cooked or cleaned. Not before their wives worked, not since. Talking about it out loud made me feel like a Peeping Tom.

  Harlan started out, instinct I suppose, trying to defend the men. But even he couldn’t come up with a convincing case once he really thought about it. Like a lot of things, it had seemed normal until there was reason to question it. He was left feeling off balance too.

  And all of it kept bringing me back to Mama. She wasn’t the only woman who worked, but she was the only one around who did a man’s work driving tractors. I pondered for hours on end how she and Daddy had ever come to that agreement. And whether or not it had been completely mutual.

  She had mentioned dancing and dining with Daddy years before at the Savoy Grille. But somewhere down the road they had evolved into what appeared to be business partners. I thought about those romance novels Mama read and wondered just how far away she was living from her idea of happily ever after.

  And I wondered if pure instinct had showed her the safest place to put the blame was on my head.

  None of these explanations would make the way she treated me fair. None of them would make it right. But from what I was figuring out about human nature and Mama’s view of the world, those explanations would make sense.

  Finally the notion started sinking in just how disappointed a woman would have to be to name her daughter William, too stricken to even move on and choose another name. How, beyond farmwork, a son would have also been more valuable to someone like Mama because of his potential to grow up into a big deal that would earn her bragging rights.

  The idea would never occur to Mama that I could become a big deal. Or that she could, for that matter.

  Miss Lydia introduced Harlan and me to the fact that a women’s movement was nothing new and took us back to talk about the founding fathers. I guess she knew it was time to stop us from picking apart every family we knew.

  She said that back when the Continental Congress was framing the Constitution, Abigail Adams told her husband John not to forget the ladies, “but that’s exactly what the lot of them did. They gave the women no rights whatsoever. They couldn’t even own land.”

  “But that’s why the men were trying to break from England in the first place,” Harlan pointed out. “Taxation without representation—they had no say in their own government.”

  Miss Lydia nodded and we chewed on that a good long while.

  It was clear she had done homework of her own. She told us it was four years after the Civil War that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton began working toward an amendment that would give women the right to vote. She made sure we knew just how hard they had to fight.

  There it was, in our faces again: the Constitution.

  She had us read about a march down Pennsylvania Avenue on Woodrow Wilson’s Inauguration Day in 1913 and how it turned ugly. How the police were called in and hundreds of women wound up in the hospital.

  It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Just like Washington this time,” I said. “Montgomery, too.”

  And Miss Lydia assured us that no matter who it was—revolutionaries, the colored, women, whoever—nobody would stay down forever without rising up. Without fighting back. She was looking me square in the eye when she said it.

  I nodded that I understood.

  When we’d worked up to 1920 and the Nineteenth Amendment, Miss Lydia put the candle on the cake, so to speak. “And that, children,” she said, “is how I came to be among the first women in the United States to cast a vote for president.”

  Harlan’s mouth gaped as wide as mine. She’d told us before to put our grandparents in the timeline of the history we studied, but we had forgotten. Of course Miss Lydia was born before the turn of the twentieth century. What she was teaching us had started as a current event for her.

  That was early spring before planting season so Mama was home and cooking dinner when I got home. I was so excited about what I’d just learned I sat down at the table and told her all about it. “. . . and Miss Lydia says that’s all history is, today looking back at yesterday.”

  “Miss Lydia says too many things,” Mama snapped. The edge on her voice stung like a slap to the face.

  She was moving between the kitchen cabinet and the stove slamming pots and lids around as she went. I had been too caught up in my story to notice her bad mood hanging over the room like a cloud.

  “I’m sorry.” My mouth formed the words out of habit. “I . . . guess I do talk about her a lot.” The words came slowly, but my mind was starting to spin.

  When I dare talk to you at all, is what I thought. When I’ve taken your temperature and calculated the weight of the air in the room and decided it’s safe to have you notice me. When I’m saying anything at all to you other than “I’m sorry.”

  Anger built inside me like steam and a cool mustache of sweat broke out on my upper lip. Things began to swim until Mama became nothing but a blur.

  And then, all at once, it was right there in front of me. All of it. All the times she ignored me and all the criticism when she didn’t. All the times I thought she didn’t love me and blamed myself because my best wasn’t good enough for her. All the times I’d felt guilty just for being born.

  All the time I’d spent putting out little brush fires everywhere when really it was the whole forest that was ablaze. In a haze, I saw it all.

  And as soon as I could name it, it was gone. The anger dissipated so suddenly I was left feeling light-headed. Eye of the storm.

  Before I even knew it was coming I said, “I feel sorry for you, Mama.”

  She whirled around and dripped soup from a ladle onto the floor without noticing. “What did you just say?”

  My pulse didn’t even quicken. I almost laughed. “I said, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ ” Our eyes locked and the soup boiled over on the stove without either of us moving to save it.

  “What . . . do you mean . . . by that?” She had no idea what had just passed through me.

  “I feel sorry for you because I’ve got Miss Lydia and you’re not that close to anybody.” I just stated it as fact. “And it’s your own fault.” I chuckled. “You sure couldn’t get close to me with your son standing in the way.”

  She snorted. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and you don’t either.”

  “The fourth member of this family,” I told her. “You know. The kid you wanted. The one you didn’t have. I get the feeling you’ve always spent more time thinking about him than you did me. I’m just the one you got stuck with.”

&nb
sp; She looked like I had kicked her. “Why I ought to—,” she started.

  “Oh, save it, Mama,” I sighed. “I really don’t care anymore.” I recognized it as truth when I heard it. She was slack jawed and blinking when I turned to go to my room.

  Later I heard the TV go on and went to the kitchen to fix myself a bowl of soup with plenty of crackers on the side. Daddy looked up from the table and asked, “Do you know what’s wrong with your mother?”

  I told him yes and left the room without explaining.

  I stood by her in the living room until she looked up from her book. I took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry. I hurt your feelings and I shouldn’t have.” It was a long way from taking back what I’d said—and that fact hung in the air between us.

  She said, “Oh, I guess we both say things sometimes we don’t mean.” Fishing.

  “Okay, then,” I told her. “I’ve got homework to do while I eat.” I went to my room and shut her out.

  We took the U.S. Constitution test the first week of May 1970. It was the same week the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio while they were exercising their rights as guaranteed by the First Amendment. As far as I know, Harlan and I were the only seventh graders in Cumberland who recognized that horrible parallel.

  We did well enough to bring the class average up to “acceptable” on the government table of scores. Mr. Landis was so grateful that we knew eighth grade would be a free ride to do pretty much what we pleased.

  You get to know a teacher by the end of that first year with them. From dodging the draft to celebrating “acceptable,” we knew he didn’t care about much more than covering his own bacon.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  H  arlan and I spent June scraping and priming Miss Lydia’s house and the rest of the summer painting. We three had powwowed as soon as warm weather hit and decided on the project and assignments.

  Harlan’s job was to work on the weatherboard siding of the house.

  My job was to do all the trim work—windows and doors.

  Miss Lydia’s job was to buy the supplies, keep us fueled with home cooking, and sit inside whichever window I was working on and keep me company.

  She made sure the Willitses knew how grateful she was for Harlan’s help and she gave Mama a call whenever it was time to make her Queen for a Day. But truth was, she and Harlan and I were the real family by then. It just felt like we all belonged to one another.

  We could talk about anything. Or nothing. We could finish each other’s sentences and we did. And while I know the ruby pin passed back and forth a few times and Harlan went home in a minor snit more than once, I came to see that’s bound to happen when any three people spend as much time together as we did and I learned it wasn’t the end of the world. Almost nothing we got into it about was important enough that I remember it now. Except for one time, nothing came between us that couldn’t be fixed by a pan of Miss Lydia’s apple dumplings.

  The day I did the window trim on Curtis’s room while Miss Lydia sat inside, I thought we did a great job of playing normal. But I guess we all knew each other better than that. End of the day, Harlan called me over by his truck after Miss Lydia shut the front door.

  He looked into my eyes and said, “It was him, wasn’t it?”

  I said, “What are you talking about?” but my face was already on fire.

  Harlan said, “It was Miss Lydia’s son that hurt you.” It wasn’t a question this time.

  “I have no idea what you mean.” My knees felt weak and, even so, I wanted to run.

  He spat into the dust by his feet and squinted at the horizon. “Billie Marie,” he said, “you came back to school sixth grade wounded as a wing-shot bird. Something had happened and I’m pretty sure I know what it was.”

  Don’t cry. Don’t cry. I had thought it out so many times—if somebody figured out anything, they’d figure out everything. Fear I hadn’t felt in nearly two years started twisting me up.

  Harlan said, “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”

  Then the tears started rolling.

  He went on, “But I hope someday you want to.”

  I nodded and busted full-out sobbing. He put his arms around me—the first time he ever touched me on purpose—and cradled my head on his shoulder.

  We stood like that a long time. I could feel Miss Lydia looking at us through a window but I didn’t turn to see.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I  t’s not that nothing happened in the next two-and-a-half years. Days do follow one another without a single one of them being empty. But life as I had come to know it had been going on long enough it was like singing the same song with only an occasional new verse.

  Harlan and I breezed through eighth grade about as we had expected. We scored so high on all the standard tests Miss Mitchell, the principal herself, called us in to thank us. I got the impression we were practically all that was keeping the tax money coming.

  Not that we were that smart. I have no false pride in that regard. But we didn’t depend on the school. Miss Lydia pushed us and we pushed each other. We read and discussed stuff every day.

  Miss Lydia got the idea from a TV quiz show to make up a stack of flash cards and then she added to them every week. Every so often we’d have our own contest.

  She’d hold up a card that said JANUARY 30, 1968 and Harlan and I would race to yell, “Tet Offensive!”

  It would say “SALT” and we’d trip over our tongues saying, “Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.” It was really hard jumping from one subject to another like that but making it a competition made us try harder. I’m sure Miss Lydia had known that it would.

  One game, half an hour in, she held up a card that said “LBJ.” Harlan and I gave each other a “what the—?” look before we both shouted, “Lyndon Baines Johnson!”

  Miss Lydia shook her head and I thought oh, I see. “Lady Bird Johnson!” I said.

  She shook her head again.

  Harlan took a stab. “Lynda Bird Johnson?”

  Nope. It took me several seconds to come up with “Luci Baines Johnson?”

  That still wasn’t it. Harlan and I frowned, stumped.

  “Lydia Belle Jenkins,” she said primly and went on to the next card before we’d stopped laughing.

  The other students at school seemed like sleepwalkers except when hormones cattle-prodded somebody into doing something impressively stupid. The seventh-grade side of the room was half-empty for a week’s suspension after Sherry Day collected a dollar from every boy who wanted to take a peek inside her bloomers and then made good on the deal after lunch in the upstairs hallway.

  But most of the time it was like dancing in a building full of plodding zombies.

  Harlan and I were still the only mixed pair of best friends. But by then nobody seemed to think anything of it at all.

  That happens in a small town. Somebody passing through might stop at the grain elevator for a cold drink and be shocked to see an old man feeding his lap dog every other bite of his sandwich, but a local would just say, “Oh, that’s old man Sullivan. He’s always been sweet on his little dogs.”

  I guess it’s easier to live in a fishbowl if you just decide to accept the stripes on the other fish.

  Then there was the matter of Mama. I don’t know if calling her bluff had awakened a conscience in her or if she just didn’t find it as much fun to get mad and rear up at someone who didn’t care. But she had gotten a whole lot tamer and sometimes it even seemed like we had traded places and she was trying to get in good with me.

  A couple of times she asked if I’d like to go along to town with her on Saturday—and I told her “no, thank you.” She moved us all back to the kitchen table for dinner and, for a few evenings, asked me just what we were studying at school. I gave her the shortest possible answer and added, “Thanks for asking, Mama,” each time. I was ever so polite. A week later she went back to eating in the living room.

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bsp; We weren’t any chummier than ever, but just the lack of yelling—and not living on edge waiting for the next firestorm—made for a happier house.

  Even Daddy was happier. I guess. I still didn’t know much about what Daddy thought other than how everybody was out to get Nixon and the way the goddamned government is always trying to keep the farmer down. That, and he usually had an opinion about whether or not it was going to rain.

  But his face wasn’t set in a permanent frown anymore. I took that as a step in the direction of happy, anyway.

  Ninth grade I went back to school wearing a little mascara and lip gloss. Harlan didn’t say anything, but he did start opening doors for me. The second day at lunch I caught a faint whiff of something new. I sneaked looks until I saw evidence he had started shaving.

  It was funny to have so many things about us changing while everything else stayed exactly the same. Funny peculiar, that is.

  We had exchanged small gifts for birthdays and Christmas two years running. Miss Lydia always gave Harlan and me each a book, I crocheted some little something for her, and by then Harlan had a homemade birdhouse hanging on every branch outside her house that would hold one. For one another, Harlan and I usually bought music albums—something to share.

  But that year I gave Harlan a George Carlin album and he gave me tiny ruby heart earrings. We were on the stage during study hour. I opened the little velvet box and was so surprised I just said, “Oh!”

  Harlan said, “To go with your pin.” He sounded pretty proud. Of course he knew about the ruby pin that passed between Miss Lydia and me. There had even been times one of us had stuck our foot in our mouth and he’d defused the situation with a world-weary voice saying, “Oookay. Which one of you has the pin?”

  When I saw those earrings I was so embarrassed I tried to make a joke—“Well, gee, Harlan, does this mean you’re going to pierce your ears so we can pass these back and forth?”