“He makes a tonic that he sells as a sideline: Wilky’s Silk Revitalizing Elixir. That stuff just flies out of there on Sundays, not to mention Saturday nights. Between you and me and the bedpost, that stuff should be called Wilky’s Kick-in-the-Pants instead of Silk. It’s like drinking gasoline.”
“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.
“I went there once.”
“You did?”
“I was curious, that’s all. A girl from my own church, St. Alphonse, switched over and started going there. But I knew after ten minutes it wasn’t for me.”
“Why not?”
“I like to worship in a place that smells good, not like boiled carrots, and where the pews are hard and smooth and holy. I like when the priest talks in that fancy language that I don’t understand, makes me feel he’s closer to God. Reverend Wilky, well, he just scares me. Tells folks they’re sinners and have to pay for a chance to see the heavenly gates. What’s the point in trying down here if it won’t take you someplace better?”
“I still think his daughter deserves to have shoes,” I said. “Mrs. Newman gave the girl her shoes just so she could go to school.”
“Her name is Helen,” said Peg. “She probably sold the shoes the next day to pay for a week’s worth of macaroni. Don’t think I’m hardhearted, Annie. I’ve spent some time feeling sorry for that girl, but after she took my Sunday slip right off the line, along with six pairs of my father’s socks? That’s where my sorry goes straight out to the ashcan. Even if her father put the socks on and thanked her for them, even if he sent her out to get them! There has to be a point where a child is smart enough to know right from wrong, and stands up in the face of it.”
I stopped thinking about Helen right there and started thinking about myself. Peg had accidentally poked a stick into a tender spot. Was I smart enough to know right from wrong? Was I going to stand up and do something about it?
I found a pair of shoes that no longer fit me, and an old tunic the color of mulberries that I’d never liked anyway. From the costume trunk, I pilfered a green jacket and a couple of chiffon scarves. Not the essentials, but at least Helen would have her own shoes. I made a bundle and set it beside my bedroom door. Delivery would be another challenge.
One morning, without even meaning to, I stepped outside at the very moment when Sammy was passing by. His smile erased the hundred hours of wishing for it.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.
“No,” I said, glancing around for Delia.
“You act so shy,” said Sammy, “but you’re not really.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You must be friendly to be in contact with other worlds,” he said. “Like an ambassador.”
I had a choice. I could tell him flat out that I knew little enough of this world, let alone any other, or I could continue to feel warm all over, under his sunny gaze.
“It’s really my mother who travels to the Great Beyond,” I said. “But I’m learning.”
“I bet you’re really good at it,” said Sammy. He stopped walking and looked straight at me. I looked straight back at him, my heart thrashing under Mama’s cashmere cardigan.
“Hello, Sammy Sloane!” Giggles showered us on all sides. They came from the girl named Lexie and two of her ninth-grade friends.
“Hello, Lexie,” said Sammy. “Do you know Annie? Annie, this is Lexie and Ruthie and Jean.”
“Hello,” I said, as if I hadn’t eavesdropped on their conversations a dozen times. We were nearly at the school gate.
“You’re the one who used to be, uh, poorly, aren’t you?” said Jean, peering though smudged eyeglasses.
Jean:
Likes to eat popped corn with maple syrup.
Hates spiders.
“That’s one way of putting it,” I said.
“I heard you were an idiot,” said Ruthie, who was round and pink.
Ruthie:
Cried for a week when her turtle crossed over.
Not allowed to wear lipstick.
“She’s got the Gift,” said Sammy, as proud as if he’d given it to me himself. “She can see into the future and talk to spirits.”
“Is that true?” asked Jean, squinting.
“Can you really?” said Lexie.
I felt Sammy’s eyes on me and succumbed instantly to temptation. “Well, yes,” I admitted. “Since I was healed, I have entered a trance and received messages from a girl who died in the thirteenth century.”
Miss Primley’s bell clanged from the steps.
“What?” said Lexie.
“You have?” exclaimed Sammy. “I’ll have to hear about that!”
The bell kept going. Sammy headed toward the BOYS door, and I followed the girls to our entrance.
“What does that mean?” asked Jean. “How can you receive messages from someone who’s dead?”
“I go into a trance and the spirit takes me over. She uses me to write her words down on paper.” It sounded dumb now that Sammy was gone.
“Will you show us?”
“Well, it doesn’t just happen,” I said. “There are preparations and circumstances …”
“Will you eat lunch with us?” invited Lexie. “We’ve noticed that you’re always alone. Do you want to sit with us today?”
As silly as it seemed, I thought just possibly I’d hear the secret of being a regular girl. So I ate lunch with them, sitting on a bench near the water fountain instead of nestled between the roots of my tree.
One thing I learned was that I was not the only girl to have noticed the charms of Sammy Sloane.
“Ooooh! He’s so cute!” said Jean.
“He makes me quiver all over!” moaned Ruthie.
“If he could stop talking about Sherlock Holmes for five minutes,” said Lexie. “I’ll take Terence Price any day.”
Sammy Sloane, Freddy Blau and Terence Price, those were the three. And the girls started to chant: “Sammy Sloane? Mine alone! Freddy Blau? And how! Terence Price? Kiss me twice!” And then they collapsed with hysterical laughter. Well, I thought Freddy was conceited, and Terence Price had hair that hung about his ears like oiled thread. I’d put Sammy far above the others, but my only hope of being his choice was my dubious connection to the Other Side. So was it me he’d be choosing, or my mother’s daughter?
“Mama,” I said as Peg and I set the table for supper. “I’ve been invited to spend the night in the home of one of my new school friends.”
I counted silently to ten. Mama watched me, perhaps waiting for me to say I was joking.
“On Saturday night,” I said. “I’ve told Lexie I’d like to come. It’s a sleeping-over party, with two other girls.”
No reply.
“She lives on Walnut Street, in one of those big houses.”
No reply.
“Mama. Say something.”
“This is not wise, Annie.” She had to be careful, with Peg right there listening as she folded the napkins. That was why I’d chosen that moment.
“It decreases our mystical appeal if we appear ordinary in any context.”
“Please, Mama? Please? I want to be ordinary.”
“No, you do not. I don’t want to hear you say that ever again.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean ordinary, I mean …”
What could I tell her? I meant ordinary. I meant not unusual, not a freak, unremarkable, not remarked upon, not weird—ordinary. For the occasional Saturday night, anyway.
“I mean—I want to have friends,” I said.
“You don’t need friends,” sniffed Mama. I looked at Peg.
“Lexie Johns?” said Peg, trying to help. “She’s a nice girl. Her daddy owns the lumber mill by the river.”
“That’s the one,” I said, feeling Mama’s breathing quicken next to me. “Ruthie said that Lexie has a big bedroom with two canopy beds, just for overnight guests.”
“Her mother belongs to the country club over in Timmons,” said Peg. “On
e of the first women ever to play golf there. She goes out every Saturday. I know the girl, Alice, who’s the maid over there. Says Mrs. Johns just throws out her golf shoes if the course was muddy and buys a new pair. Alice never has to clean them.”
Peg went to stir butter into the rice.
“You keep your ears open” was all Mama said to me after that.
15
It is bad luck to
point at the moon.
I packed my suitcase with a bubble of glee rising in my throat. Don’t be too excited, I warned myself; these are silly girls. But I was eager to study the ceremonies of friendship close up.
I wished I had a new nightdress instead of old flannel pajamas from the boys’ department at the F. W. Woolworth Co. in Hawley. I slipped into Mama’s room and rifled her drawers.
Almost at once I uncovered a stash of paper money, rolled in bundles an inch thick and tied with narrow blue ribbon. All our customers paid in cash, of course, to hear their futures told. Like a squirrel who hides nuts in more than one tree, Mama kept her money in several secret places. She knew there were occasions when a speedy departure could not wait for banking hours. There were eight bundles here in the drawer, and more in the muslin sugar sack in the pantry, and in a hatbox on the shelf in the hall closet, and lying in the false bottom of our trunk. Each bundle held twenty twenty-dollar bills. Four hundred dollars, multiplied by how many bundles altogether? A lot of money. Enough to buy a house?
But I was not looking for money at the moment.
I touched the silk pouches that held Mama’s necklaces and rings, and two photographs in gilded leather frames. One was of me, when I was five years old, sitting on the step of our Lenny’s Famous caravan, wearing the biggest hair bow you ever saw. The other picture was slightly out of focus, and though I’d never told Mama I’d seen it, let alone had her show it to me, I liked to think it was my father.
Mama said my father had died in the Great War, but I didn’t believe her. I thought she didn’t know where my father was and didn’t like to admit it. She’d made up a good story over the years, but I’d been paying attention and the details changed quite a bit from telling to telling.
I was pretty sure his name was William because usually she referred to him as Will, except the once when he was Henry. Where they met was either at a dance or at a party at a friend’s house, or one time she said a museum in New York City. They might have been married or they might not, but I suspected not.
“Was his name William Grey?” I’d asked, and she’d laughed before realizing I might really care to know. And then she said, “No, no, it wasn’t. I used my maiden name professionally and it was best to keep it that way.”
Whoever he was, he was gone now.
I found a silk shift, never worn in my company, folded in tissue paper beneath Mama’s personal garments. Oh, it was lovely, the way it rippled over my fingers almost like water. I rolled it into the bottom of my suitcase, with a change of underclothing and a fresh blouse. I put in my hairbrush and my toothbrush. What else? I wanted my suitcase to be full to the brim. It seemed like a momentous expedition—as if I were making a journey as far as the Pacific Ocean or the Baltic Sea. But I was only going to Lexie’s house, so I shut the lid and snapped closed the catches. No one had to know it was my first night away from the home of my mother, aside from those grim hours on a cot at the sheriff’s house in Carling. No one except my mother knew about that.
My stomach was in knots during supper. I moved the food around, spread out the peas, chopped up the chicken into tiny pieces. I didn’t want Mama using a poor appetite as an excuse to cancel the evening. Peg stayed to tidy and then handed me a waxed-paper packet.
“I made some raspberry jumbles for your little party tonight,” she said. “A surefire path to popularity is to arrive with raspberry jumbles.”
“Oh, thank you, Peg!” I clasped her in my arms and kissed her on the cheek. “How would I know anything without you?”
I heard Mama snort but chose to ignore her. I looked at her only once more, when I waved from the door and stepped out into the navy blue night.
As Peg had said, Lexie lived in one of the “grand houses” of Peach Hill, one street over from Mr. Poole’s. The wide front porch overlooked a front lawn nearly the size of the town square. The other girls were there already, all piled into a porch swing that hung from the rafters like a cradle. It creaked and groaned under the weight of three giggling, writhing bodies. The handle of my suitcase got slippery, I was clutching it so tightly. At last their giddiness faded and they noticed that I was there.
“You’ve come!”
“Come in, we’ve been waiting!”
“Annie’s here!”
The swing squawked as they all jumped off.
“Come in, come in, we’ve had the best idea!” They dragged me inside, where Lexie’s mother appeared, summoned by the noise. She was wearing a soft blue suit and had her hair bobbed, like a lady in a magazine.
“Hello, darlings!”
Lexie kissed her mother and clasped her hand.
“Hello, Mummy. This is Annie. Remember? I told you?”
The weight of that “told” swung like an ominous tree branch above my head. “Told” meant all the rumors, all the dirt: “I’m bringing home the town oddball, be polite!”
“Ah, yes! Annie! How nice that you could come tonight.”
“Good evening, Mrs. Johns,” I said.
“I’ll send Alice up shortly with snacks for you girls.”
“I brought raspberry jumbles.”
“Oohh!” squeaked the girls.
“Why, Annie, that’s lovely of you. Would you all like lemonade to go with your treats?”
Her niceness made me dizzy.
I was hauled up the stairs, into Lexie’s bedroom. They spun me around so I could see the enormous princess beds with gauzy canopies, the thick rug, the flounced curtains, the vanity table lit up on both sides of the mirror with twinkling lights.
“Look what Lexie has!” Ruthie thrust something at me.
“It’s a Ouija board!” they cried, bubbling over. “Everybody has one now!”
“And we thought—” said Lexie.
“We thought,” said Ruthie, “since you have a natural ability—”
“—you could probably summon the dead,” said Jean, “or contact that spirit girl you mentioned and—”
“—bring her ghost here! To my bedroom!”
What could I do? This was exactly what my mother had feared, that silly girls all over the country were joining the craze for spirit calling and would stop paying the professionals. But silly girls couldn’t do it right. Only clever ones could.
“Have you seen a Ouija board before?” asked Lexie when I hesitated.
“Uh, yes. Yes, of course,” I said. “I was only thinking. To do this properly, we should make some preparations.”
More squeals and clapping hands and jumping up and down.
“Do you have any candles?”
“I wouldn’t be allowed candles in my bedroom,” said Lexie.
Jean and Ruthie pouted. “Come on, Lexie, can’t you sneak them?”
“We don’t need them,” I said quickly, seeing Lexie’s doubt. “Look, there’s a moon. It’ll be high enough in no time. We’ll use that.” I pulled apart the frothy curtains. Lexie turned off the row of lights above her vanity and the lamp in the ceiling. Moonlight trickled across the floor and Lexie’s bed in a weak stripe. The darker the better, for my purposes.
“My mother always says the moon draws out secrets,” I said, making up my patter on the spot. “The same way it rules the tides.”
“Ooh.”
“What’s it like to have your mother?” asked Jean.
“She’s the only one I have, so it’s normal to me.”
“She’s very pretty,” said Ruthie, as if she were handing me a present.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Do you think she’ll get married again?” asked Jean. “My
parents saw her driving out with Mr. Poole. Father was saying a fellow couldn’t be blamed for going into debt over a filly like that.”
“Jean!”
“I’m only saying what my father said.”
“Couldn’t your mother go into a trance and find out if she’s going to fall in love?” asked Lexie.
“Ooh, think of that!” cried Ruthie. “Does she have a crystal ball?”
How did I get myself here? I wondered. What pathetic, lonely part of me thought this would be fun?
“A clairvoyant doesn’t necessarily see what will happen,” I explained. “She is sensitive to likelihood. She sees what probably will happen.”
“Oh.”
“But seeing into the future is quite different from talking to a spirit who has passed to the Other Side,” I said.
“Let’s try the Ouija board,” said Ruthie.
“We have paper,” said Jean. “In case your ghost girl shows up.”
“Good idea,” I said. “May we sit on your bed, Lexie? And put the Ouija board directly in the moonlight? That will rouse the spirits and make them more receptive.”
“Ooh!”
They scrambled to remove their shoes, as did I, since that was the point of the suggestion. We settled more or less in a circle on the billowy eiderdown. I tucked my left foot—always the best cracker—neatly under the Ouija board, which rested on our knees.
I showed them how to place their fingers lightly on the planchette so that it could move easily from letter to letter while the spirits spelled out answers.
“Let’s take turns asking,” said Lexie. “Me first because it’s my Ouija board.” No one could argue with that.
“Oh, Great Ouija!” Lexie intoned. “Come to us and share your wisdom! Come unto us, O spirit!”
I cracked my toe.
How It Happened in Peach Hill Page 9