Martha Calhoun
Page 1
Copyright © 1988 by Richard Babcock
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Babcock, Richard.
Martha Calhoun/by Richard Babcock.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82424-0
I. Title.
PS3552.A174M37 1988
813′.54–dc19 87-16612
v3.1
Martha Calhoun is a work of fiction. The characters and events in it have been invented by the author. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Dedication
About the Author
ONE
One thing about Bunny, she’s got beautiful blond hair. It’s the first thing about her you’d notice. Actually, she’s got lots of great features—soft, clear skin, blue eyes, long, muscled legs. She’s the most beautiful woman in Katydid, Illinois. But she was always proudest of her hair. She used to talk to me about it, showing it off. (Bunny is my mother. I call her Bunny because that’s all I ever heard anyone call her. My father, Jeremiah P. Calhoun, ran away before I was born.)
When I was about six, Bunny went through a phase where she was upset because her hair was turning darker. It was still very blond, and she helped it along with a little peroxide—Sweden in a bottle, as she used to say—but it was no longer pure blond corn silk, the way it was when she was young. I guess the change had started after my brother, Tom, was born, when Bunny was eighteen. She understood that life goes on and that she had to grow older, but still she was sorry, and she always wished that Grandmother had thought to snip off a lock of her hair years ago, just so there’d be some souvenir of how things had once been. Then Bunny got it in her head that I should never suffer like that. My hair is plain brown. At best, just after it’s been washed, it has a kind of reddish sheen. But Bunny was concerned that, like her, I’d lose something and then be sorry, so she clipped off a bit of my hair and put it in an envelope. That way, she said, I’d have something to save and show my own daughters, if I ever had any. But later she started worrying that we’d lose the envelope or forget where she’d put it. So she clipped some more hair, and then again and again and again. Over the course of a year or so, she kept taking samples and hiding them away. After a while, there were locks of my hair everywhere. I’d be looking over a bookshelf or rummaging through a drawer and suddenly come across an envelope with my name on it and a soft chunk of my hair inside. It always gave me an eerie feeling, as if I’d grown very old or gone far away.
That was around 1946, about ten years ago, just after the war. I’ve been thinking a lot about those times recently. Bunny’s little house on Sycamore Street, where we’d lived since I was two, is closed up now. All our things are locked inside. I keep imagining that some time, years from now, someone will go in and discover everything—our clothes, the furniture, Tom’s baseball-card collection, my locks of hair—and try to piece together our lives from the evidence. They’ll never get it right, of course, but it’s fun to think of the romance, the mystery they’ll attach to us—“Another lock of hair! What can it mean?”—particularly given the way things really were, and the way they turned out.
This is my explanation of all that. My testimony, my confession, whatever you want to call it—the story I probably should have told before and didn’t. My name is Martha Calhoun, and I’m sixteen. I turned sixteen three months ago. Looking back, I think that may have been part of the trouble. I turned sixteen—Sweet Sixteen—and I expected something to happen. To celebrate, Bunny took me to dinner at Walker’s Chinese, outside of town. We got dressed up—me in a sweater and skirt, Bunny in a black sheath and heels. While we were sitting there, two men we didn’t know—businessmen passing through town, probably—noticed us and sent over drinks. It seemed so romantic, Bunny and me being courted. Of course, I was too young to have a drink. Bunny finished both of them and then shooed the men away. But still, it seemed as if I’d passed a point, that things were starting to happen.
The next day, though, I woke up, and everything was the same. Bunny’s house was still tiny and messy. My best friend was still Mary Sue Zimmerman, though she really only qualified through endurance—we’d known each other since we were both five. Katydid was the same little town, full of farmers and ex-farmers, living from one county fair to the next. And, of course, I still had the same brown hair, the same angular face, the same towering body.
Over the next few days, while Bunny was at work, I spent hours in the bathroom, studying myself in the mirror. I remembered that Bunny had once said that she could look at other kids and tell exactly how they were going to turn out. With me, she wasn’t sure. “You defy me,” she had said. “I see too much. You’ve got too many possibilities.” Staring at myself in the mirror, hour after hour, I used to wonder what she saw. All I am is tall. I’ve always been one of the tallest in any group. Even as a child, I was an expert on the tops of boys’ heads, a connoisseur of the incredible swirls of hair, sometimes double-barreled, that form just behind the crown, of the sweeping waves that push forward from the back. By ten, I was taller than Bunny, and even with Tom, who was a year older. At fourteen, I passed him and towered half a head above most of the boys my age. I finally realized what was happening and willed myself to stop growing, but by then I was almost five eleven, and it was already too late. To compensate, I developed a permanent slouch, almost a hunchback. That helped a little, and, over time, some of the boys started to catch up; a few even passed me. (Today, Tom and I are exactly even again.) But nothing ever erased my feeling that I was from a different race, one that was fundamentally a mistake. Leafing once through a social studies book, I came to a photograph and stopped. There I was: A totem pole carved by a tribe of Pacific Coast Indians, a thin, knobby log topped by an enormous, beaky bird’s head.
It didn’t help any being Tom’s sister. Everybody knew about him, or if they didn’t, he made sure they found out. He was always in trouble. Even when we were little and the best of friends, his face would light up at the prospect of doing something naughty. We’d be playing happily enough, and suddenly he’d get an idea—let’s hide the neighbor boy’s bicycle, let’s put a scoop of Jell-O in Bunny’s coat pocket—and he wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d done it. I used to argue with him, but he always had some reason why it was really all right—he was just playing
a joke, or only getting even. Then, as he got older, you couldn’t argue with him at all.
Given my feelings of awkwardness and Tom’s reputation, the solution was to stay quiet and out of sight, and by the time I started high school, I’d become almost a recluse. I’d venture out to school and to the usual school events, but I drifted farther and farther from the world of my classmates. Mostly, I just stayed home and waited, looking forward to the time when Bunny would get back from work or from her date, wherever she was.
I don’t know why I thought that being sixteen would change anything. Perhaps I was carried away by boredom. Once school had let out for the summer, I didn’t have much to do. Occasionally, I’d sub for Bunny or one of the other waitresses out at the Katydid Country Club. That probably sounds like a more glamorous place than it is. They call it a country club, but there aren’t any tennis courts or swimming pools. In fact, the golf course only has twelve holes—to make a complete game, you have to play the first six over again. But there’s a restaurant at the club where Bunny had worked as long as I could remember. Actually, the food wasn’t bad. The cook was an Indian man called Gunga Din—that wasn’t his real name, of course, just something people gave him from the movie. He claimed he was once personal chef to a rajah, and he was full of stories about riding elephants and tracking Bengal tigers. How he ended up in Katydid has never been clear to me. He lived in back of the country club, above the equipment barn in a room he shared with Shorty, the greenskeeper. They made a very odd pair. Shorty’s deaf and he can hardly talk, and Gunga was always going on about his glory days in India. Bunny once told me never to go back to their place.
Anyway, the real trouble for me actually started a couple of years ago out at the country club, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Business was slow that night, and Bunny had brought me along to keep her company. One of her tables was occupied by the Benedicts, a family I’d seen around for years. Mr. Benedict was an airline pilot and often out of town, but Mrs. Benedict was a country-club regular, a young, very dark, very stylish woman, a slacks lady, as Bunny put it. The three Benedict children had come along, and the family was having a pleasant dinner, perhaps happy to have the father around. After a while, I noticed that Bunny was getting depressed. This was right at a time when Tom was at his worst, and it weighed on her, seeing another family so carefree. Finally, she couldn’t restrain herself. “Don’t you have any trouble with these children?” she asked Mrs. Benedict. “I mean, don’t they give you any problems?” Bunny was preoccupied and looking for reassurance or she never would have said anything, but Mrs. Benedict isn’t the type to coddle people. “Children can only return the love they get,” she said. Of course, that made Bunny feel worse. I tried to comfort her, but I couldn’t. Just two days before, Tom had shot out all the windows on the back porch with his BB gun.
For some reason, though, ever after that evening, Mrs. Benedict took a special interest in me. I noticed it off and on, but especially when I started subbing at the club at the beginning of the summer. At first, she was just very friendly—she’d ask how I was doing, or comment about what I was wearing. Pretty soon, she began giving me suggestions on makeup and styling, and she’d bring me little samples of perfume or lipstick that her husband had picked up in his travels. Once after lunch, she took me down to the ladies’ locker room and showed me how to put on a new lotion she liked.
“You stroke upward from the throat,” she said, as we stretched our necks, craning toward the mirror. “Over the chin and across the face.”
The lotion was chilly and tingly against my skin. I felt very adult.
“I like this stuff,” Mrs. Benedict went on, vigorously rubbing it into her face. “It’s new. They say it replaces the hormones you lose when you get old or when you’re tense. Who knows? It’s probably just advertising, right?”
“Right.”
“But you do need something. Your skin wears out. What does your mother use?”
“Bunny?” It was strange talking this way, looking in the mirror. We were talking to each other but looking at ourselves. “I’m not sure. Mostly just lipstick, I guess.”
“No creams? She better watch out or she’s going to lose those looks of hers.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“She needs more sleep.”
“Yeah.”
“More nights at home.”
“Yeah.”
Mrs. Benedict straightened up. Our eyes met in the mirror. “You don’t mind if I talk this way, do you? Speaking frankly, that is.”
“Oh, no.”
“That’s just my way.”
“Oh, I understand.”
“Here, take this,” she said, giving me the jar of cream. “You use it. See if your mother wants to try it.”
“Thanks.”
Later, Bunny caught me in the bathroom at home, giving myself a facial.
“What’s this?” she said, scrunching her nose and holding the little glass jar between two fingers.
“Mrs. Benedict gave it to me. It’s a hormone cream. It helps your skin.”
“Junk,” said Bunny. “A waste of money. And what’s all this stuff?” She waved her hand at the small collection of makeup jars I’d spread around the sink.
“Stuff.”
“Junk. All the makeup in the world won’t help if you don’t have character in your face. Character’s the thing.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re beautiful.”
“You would be too if you let your character come out.”
The truth is, though, the makeup did make me look better. And Mrs. Benedict started complimenting me and pointing out things about me to her friends. I’d come to her table to take an order, and she’d make me spin like a model so everyone could inspect me from all sides and angles. After a while, she began referring to me as her “summer project.”
When I told Bunny that, she blew up. “What’s the matter with that old fat bottom?” Bunny demanded. “Doesn’t she think I can raise my own daughter?”
But I figured Bunny was still sensitive about the comment Mrs. Benedict had made at dinner that time. And, to me, the comment didn’t mean much, it was just the way Mrs. Benedict talked.
Then one day Mrs. Benedict tugged on my sleeve and whispered that she had a proposition for me. I was serving lunch at the time, and she promised to explain later, down in the ladies’ locker room, where she was going to play bridge. Once lunch was over, I went down there. Mrs. Benedict hopped up from her bridge game and led me by the hand around a corner, out of sight of everyone else.
“I’ve had a wonderful idea,” she said, breathlessly. “Why don’t you come work for me? Our regular babysitter, Mrs. Johnson, is leaving to spend the rest of the summer with her sister in Minnesota, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have replace her than you.”
“Gee,” I said. “That’s nice of you.” Actually, I was a little disappointed. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I’d been a babysitter before and I thought waitressing—even as a substitute—was a better job.
“Well, what do you think?” asked Mrs. Benedict excitedly.
“I’ll have to talk to Bunny.”
“Oh, of course. Of course talk to Bunny.” She backed up a step, cooling by several degrees. “But this is an excellent opportunity. And you’re old enough to start making these decisions on your own.”
Just as I thought, Bunny didn’t like the idea. “Why didn’t she ask me first?” Bunny grumbled, as we drove home. “Nobody thinks about mothers any more.”
“Bunny, Mrs. Benedict is a mother. Besides, I’m old enough to be offered a job by myself.” By then, I’d thought about it and decided the job might be all right after all—the work would be steady, the pay was reasonable, and I’d have something to keep me busy.
“But you won’t make as much money. You’ll earn more as a waitress.”
“I’m not sure. She said she’d use me four or five times a week. That will mean at least fifteen hours.”
“Bunny, you used to leave Tom and me alone half the night.”
“That was different,” Bunny said. “I always knew where you were.”
“Huh?”
“You were in bed.”
“Anyway, fifteen times 75 cents an hour means $11.25 a week. I’ve only made that much once out at the country club.”
“But you’ll start working more. Just be patient.” Bunny drove once around the square and managed to find a parking space just down the block from Meyers’ Grocery. We went inside to buy eggs and milk, and when we came out, Dwayne Spinelli, the simple man, was leaning against the hood of Bunny’s car. His bicycle was resting against a pole. “That’s retarded,” said Dwayne when he saw us. It’s what he always says. “Retarded” is the only long word he’s ever learned.
“Hello, Dwayne,” said Bunny. “Tell Martha she should work at the country club.”
Dwayne’s uncertain eyes searched Bunny’s face for some sort of clue, and he plucked nervously at his black hair. His short-sleeved print shirt was buttoned high up under his chin, but the tail had worked its way out of his shorts and was flapping around his hips.
“Tuck in your shirt, Dwayne,” said Bunny. Relieved, he grinned and jumped up and pushed the shirttail out of sight.
When we were back in the car, I said, “They don’t need me out at the country club. Half the time, nobody sits at my tables. Three waitresses are enough, even if one of them’s not working.”
“Be patient. Maybe someone will go on vacation.”
“Who’s going to go on vacation? Beatrice and Millie only work there in the summer.”
“But maybe next year you’ll be full time. Mr. Higgins has taken a shine to you.”
“It’s you he’s taken a shine to, Bunny.”
Mr. Higgins was the bartender and also the manager of the club. He and Bunny went back a long ways.
“It’s all the same,” said Bunny.
That night, when Bunny came home, I asked her again about the babysitting job. “Haven’t you forgotten about that yet?” she groaned. The little Franklin boy had thrown a scoop of chocolate ice cream onto Bunny’s pink waitress uniform, and she was standing at the kitchen sink in her slip, trying to wash out the stain. There was a bare bulb over her head, hanging by a cord. She’d broken the glass shade years ago. Last winter, Eddie Boggs put in a new shade, but Bunny made him take it down. She said she was used to the bright light and shadows—they seemed the way a kitchen should be.