by D. Anne Love
The last bell rang just as the magic show ended. I could hear applause and laughter coming from the auditorium, and excited voices as the hallways filled. Cooley came tearing into the library and asked the librarian for a book on how to do magic tricks. I was headed for the door when he said, “Hey, Garnet. What are you going to be for Halloween?”
I kept walking. I was definitely not in the mood for his wisecracks.
“Maybe you could dress up like Little Orphan Annie, seeing as how your daddy’s sick and your mama ran off.”
“She didn’t run off. She’s in Nashville getting a record contract, and she’s going to be more famous than Cordell Jackson.”
“That’s not what I heard. I heard your mama dropped you off like a stray cat and hightailed it out of Willow Flats before the sun went down.”
I wasn’t surprised he knew. Cooley’s family, and the rest of them down at Aunt Julia’s church, acted holier than Swiss cheese, but anytime they got wind of the tiniest piece of gossip, they were all over it like a hen on a June bug. “My mother loves me,” I said. “That’s why she named me for a precious gem.”
Cooley cackled. “Garnets aren’t precious gems.”
“They are too.”
“Bet me.”
Through the library window, I saw Sunday Larson’s bus coming up the road. “Forget it. I have to go.”
I escaped to the bus and took my usual seat behind Sunday.
“How’s it going, Garnet?” she asked. “Any word from your mama lately?”
“I wish everybody would just shut up about my mother!”
Sunday blinked. “Well, pardon me for breathing.”
She ground the gears and honked at a couple of boys standing in the driveway. Then the ninth graders burst through the schoolhouse doors and boarded the bus. I scooted over, hoping Opal would see that I’d had a bad day and would sit with me, but she passed me by like a freight train passing a hobo and sat in the back with Seth Naylor, the human scarecrow who’d nearly knocked her over in the office on the first day of school. Seth’s dishwater-colored hair was falling into his eyes, and a pimple the size of Cleveland was forming on his chin. His arms and legs stuck out at weird angles, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down when he talked. All in all he was fairly pathetic, but Opal was looking at him like he was first prize in a raffle she couldn’t believe she’d won. It amazed me what she found attractive.
The bus jostled over the bumps and potholes in the road as we passed Charlie Twelvetrees’s place. He was in the yard puttering around his canoe. When Sunday tooted the horn, Charlie looked up and waved.
“He sure takes good care of that canoe,” I said, hoping Sunday would understand I meant it as an apology for my outburst.
“He takes it to the river every day, and he’s way past eighty.” She stopped at our mailbox. “One of these days we’ll find him dead out there. Stubborn old goat.” She cranked open the bus door. “Take it easy, Garnet.”
I waited for Opal to get off the bus. “Where were you during the magic show?” I demanded. Sunday gunned the engine and took off up the road. “I had to sit in the library with the Bartons.”
“Seth paid for my ticket.” Opal shook out her hair. “He’s shy, but nice.”
“What about Octopus Boy? And Waymon Harris? I thought you were his girlfriend.”
Opal looked so upset I wished I hadn’t brought up the subject of the boy she’d left behind. “We’ll never go back to Mirabeau,” she said as we crossed the road to the mailbox. “And Waymon has forgotten me. He never answered my letter.”
Jean Ann hadn’t answered my letter either. As far as our friends back home were concerned, me and Opal might as well be dead. I opened Aunt Julia’s mailbox and pulled out a huge brown envelope covered in postage stamps. “Holy smokes! It’s from Mama!”
“Let me see!” Opal dropped her books and ripped open the envelope. A note fluttered out.
My Precious Gems,
I hope you like these presents. The shirt is for you, Garnet. The swimsuit is for Opal. It’s the very latest style from Paris. I miss you both and I’ll be there to get you very soon. Cross my heart.
Love, Mama
Deep down I didn’t think Mama’s promise could be for real—look at how many times she had disappointed me already—but I wanted to believe it like it was the truest thing I’d ever heard. Opal unfolded the swimsuit, two scraps of bright yellow fabric with seahorses printed on it. “It’s a bikini!” She started to laugh. “It’s just like Mama to send a swimsuit when it’s too cold to wear it. As if I’d be caught dead in such a skimpy thing anyway.”
She handed me a grape-colored satin shirt. The front was covered in sequins, and the word Nashville was written across the back in big flowing white letters. Opal hooted. “That is one ugly shirt. What on earth was Mama thinking?”
I shrugged. Nothing Mama had done lately made any sense.
“You can wear it for Halloween,” Opal said. “It’s that scary.”
My stomach was hurting, but it was the good kind of hurt, because I was so excited. The shirt made Mama’s dream seem more real, as if it might come true after all, and she would come back for us like she promised. I held the shirt to my face, trying to breathe in the Mama-smells I remembered. I imagined her fingers grasping the pencil as she scribbled the note. I imagined her taking the envelope to the post office, licking the stamps, watching the package disappear down the mail chute.
“Come on,” Opal said, and we took our presents and the rest of the mail to the house.
When Aunt Julia saw the bikini and the shirt, she shook her head. “You need winter coats, and Melanie sends a swimsuit. I don’t know why I should be surprised.”
After supper we listened to the last game of the World Series on the radio, even though Opal wanted to listen to the Top Forty DJ from Oklahoma City. Aunt Julia picked up Mozart and sat forward in her chair, her head cocked toward the radio. When the Pirates scored their first run, she yelled so loud Mozart shot off her lap and hid behind the curtains. I cheered just like I was in the stadium watching the game in person. Opal rolled her eyes and turned the pages of her magazine louder than was necessary, to remind us of how much she was suffering.
“Bottom of the ninth,” the announcer said. “The Yankees and Pirates are tied, nine all, Mazeroski at the plate. The count is one ball, no strikes. Here’s the windup … and the pitch. A fastball to the inside …” There was a loud crack on the radio, then the announcer yelled, “Mazeroski has a hit! It’s going, going … it’s a home run! The Pirates have won the championship! What a finish to this World Series!”
“Way to go, Pirates!” Aunt Julia’s face was pink, and for once she was actually laughing. “What a great game.”
“I thought you were a Dodgers fan,” I told her, when the announcer signed off.
She scratched Mozart’s ears. “I care more about the game itself than the individual teams. You can’t live in Oklahoma and not like baseball. Mickey Mantle is originally from Spavinaw, you know.”
I nodded. I’d read about how the Mick had played baseball in homemade uniforms when he was in high school in White Bird, and then gone on to be one of the best players in the world. He’d just finished eight straight years of batting in more than a hundred runs each season. Back home me and Daddy listened to the Yankees games every chance we got. “Boy, I wish I’d been in Tiger Stadium last month when Mickey hit that six-hundred-foot homer,” I said.
“Six hundred and forty-three feet, to be exact,” Aunt Julia said.
I guess my mouth must have dropped open, because then Aunt Julia said, “Well, don’t look so surprised. My daddy taught me to love baseball when I was about your age. He took me to a game once, up in Oklahoma City, just the two of us. It was one of the best days of my life.”
Later I lay in the dark with my new shirt under my pillow, listening to the house sounds, trying to fall asleep. But Cooley’s words from that afternoon kept bouncing around in my head. I went downstairs t
o the living room, switched on the light, and took Aunt Julia’s dictionary off the shelf. Guess what? Cooley was right. Garnets are only semiprecious.
CHAPTER TEN
If I had been the boss of Willow Flats Junior High School, I’d have abolished it instantly. It was nothing like my school in Mirabeau, where I had Jean Ann to keep me company at lunch and where I knew most of the answers to the teachers’ questions. School in Willow Flats was harder. Even though I paid attention, when Mr. Stanley called on me in math class, I always got the answer wrong.
History class was even worse. It was like Miss Browning had it in for me from the very beginning, and I didn’t even know why. She was always picking on me by telling me to speak up, or taking points off my papers because I forgot to write in complete sentences. So unfair.
It wasn’t even Halloween yet, and she had already sent two notes to Aunt Julia about how I was not working to my full potential. I buckled down and memorized the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution for the weekly quizzes, but mostly I stayed quiet, desperately trying to come up with an idea for my semester project.
Powla’s art class was the only thing that made school bearable. I soaked up her words the way biscuits soak up gravy. I lived for third period, when she would bring out her slides and talk to us about making art as if we were professional artists.
On the day before Halloween she began with a picture by a painter named José Orozco. It showed a teacher wearing a blue dress and a sour expression that would stop a clock. Standing at her feet were a bunch of kids who all looked alike. Same clothes, same haircut, same grim expression. In the background was a gang of adults who also looked the same. The women wore shapeless white smocks; the men were dressed in identical gray suits and ties.
“This year we are exploring art as a way of telling stories about man and society,” Powla began in her soft accent. “Who can tell us what Orozco is saying with this piece?”
Lee Crockett shifted his huge feet and said, “They want us all to be the same.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Miss Mendez asked.
Nathan Brown raised his hand. “The government? School officials, maybe? People in authority.”
In the light of the projector bulb Nathan’s face seemed more grown-up and serious. My stomach fluttered. He’d been sitting in that same chair all semester, but now it was like I was seeing him for the first time. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
Miss Mendez said, “Yes. Orozco is commenting on the effects of conformity.”
I thought about the first day of school, when Mr. Conley had told me the train problem was meant to teach me to think, yet Miss Sparrow had spent half the period telling us how to write our headings the same, use the same color ink, fold our papers the same way. I remembered the day Miss Browning had told us about Socialists and Communists and about how a man named Karl Marx said all of history is really the story of struggles between the different classes in society. I thought about the Negroes at the Louisiana sit-ins, who were demanding their rights as citizens, the same as white people. It seemed the freedoms I’d memorized for my history quiz weren’t really for everyone. Instead, they belonged to the most powerful people, who made up the rules everybody else had to follow.
An imaginary lightbulb went on above my head. The differences between what they teach you in school and what goes on in the real world seemed like an interesting topic for my history project. I took out a piece of paper and started sketching some ideas, my eyes jumping from my paper to Orozco’s picture, then to the gorgeous Nathan Brown.
Even in art class, though, Mama’s absence hung over me like a big cloud. In the middle of making potato prints or learning about Diego Rivera and how he got into major trouble for his paintings, I’d start wondering where Mama was and what she was doing in Music City, and whether she missed me and Opal at all. I felt like I was floating in space with nothing solid to hold on to.
Miss Mendez switched off the projector, turned the lights on, and announced that our class would paint the scenery for the all-school play in the spring. “We won’t have time to do it during class,” she said, “so those who are interested will have to stay after school.”
Just my luck. Finally school offered something I really wanted, and I couldn’t have it because I lived at the end of the known universe with an eccentric aunt who refused to drive a car. Powla went on talking about the project, but I scarcely heard a word she said. I slouched in my seat, my tamped-down anger so sharp I could almost smell it.
“Pssst! Garnet!” Cooley leaned across the aisle. “What are you wearing for Halloween tomorrow?”
“None of your beeswax.”
The bell rang, ending the class. Five minutes later I was standing at my locker when Miss Mendez came up behind me. “I hope you’ll help us paint the scenery.” She had to shout a little because the hall was full of noisy people going to lunch.
“I can’t.” I grabbed my greasy lunch sack out of my locker and slammed the door shut.
“Why not?”
“I ride the bus home. There’s nobody to pick me up after school.”
“I see.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “I’m pretty sure Nathan Brown will be working with us. Perhaps his mother would give you a lift.”
As bad as I wanted to paint the scenery, the last thing I wanted was for Nathan to find out where I lived. Except for the Barton house, Aunt Julia’s was the worst in Willow Flats. Having Nathan see Aunt Julia’s place would be too humiliating.
“I have to help my aunt after school.” I hated lying to my favorite teacher when she had been so great to me. Even more, I hated feeling ashamed of the place I was forced to call home.
Miss Mendez put her hand on my shoulder. “It would be a valuable experience for you, Garnet. Talk to your aunt. See if you can work something out.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. I took my sketchbook and my lunch upstairs and pushed through the double doors to the fire escape. From there I could see the river winding through the rust-colored trees and the brown grass of the pasture beside the road. I tried to make some sketches for my history project, but disappointment had killed my enthusiasm. I swallowed a few bites of greasy sausage and waited for the bell to ring.
I slogged through history, gym class, and Mr. Riley’s fascinating lecture on the way colds are spread. As if we hadn’t heard the same thing every year since kindergarten.
“Don’t forget, people,” he said as the last bell rang. “Your projects are due next Friday.”
My report on the circulatory system, complete with a model of the heart made out of red and blue cellophane, was already done. One advantage to being unpopular: There’s always plenty of time for homework.
Seth wasn’t on the bus that afternoon, and neither were the Judd boys, so Opal sat with me. When Sunday let us off at the mailbox, we saw a black car in the yard, and a hundred different things popped into my head. I thought it was probably someone visiting from Aunt Julia’s church, but I hoped Mr. Hancock had come in person to deliver Daddy’s disability money or, even better, that Mama had got her record contract after all and had come to take us to Nashville in style.
The door opened just as we reached the porch, and a man came out carrying a stack of papers. He jammed his hat onto his head, got into his car without saying boo to us, and drove off. We went in.
“Who was that?” Opal dropped her books onto the sofa.
“He works for the county welfare office,” Aunt Julia said wearily. We followed her and Mozart to the kitchen.
“Welfare?” Opal echoed. “Are we that broke?”
“Just about.” Aunt Julia took the last three potatoes from the bin and picked up her paring knife. “I don’t understand it. Your daddy’s checks were due weeks ago.”
“So we’re going to get potted meat and powdered milk from the government, just like the Bartons,” I said.
“For a little while.” Aunt Julia dropped the potatoes into the pot. “There’s no shame in bein
g poor.” But shame and anger at Mama crashed around inside my head, and there was nothing I could do about it.
While the potatoes boiled, we drank tea and listened to the news on the radio. President Eisenhower talked about why the United States had gotten involved in Laos and Cuba. Senator Kennedy said America had lost friends around the world, thanks to the Republicans, and that he would be changing things big-time if he were elected president. The newsman said some people were afraid to vote for Mr. Kennedy because he was a Catholic and might start taking his orders from the Pope. Senator Kennedy said he would quit before he’d let that happen.
Then a song came on, about a girl who was afraid to come out of the water because she was wearing a tiny yellow bikini.
“Listen, y’all!” Opal said. “They’re singing about that silly swimsuit Mama sent!”
Aunt Julia laughed, a booming sound so unexpected I temporarily forgot that I was mad at the whole world. I laughed too, until my eyes watered. When the song ended, Aunt Julia wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron and said, “Garnet, what are you wearing tomorrow for Halloween?”
“I’m not wearing a costume.”
“Well, of course you are. Opal is wearing one, aren’t you, Opal?”
“Not really. In high school it’s different.”
“Oh.” Aunt Julia spooned potatoes and fatback onto our plates. “We must figure out something for Garnet, though. It’s important to fit in at school.”
She set her jaw, and I could see it was no use trying to talk her out of it. Once Aunt Julia made up her mind about something, she was as persuasive as a rock in a sock.
“I told her she should wear that awful shirt Mama sent,” Opal said, stirring more sugar into her iced tea. “Honestly, have you ever seen anything so hideous?”