by Mary Morris
“Have who over?” Victor replied, a Cincinnati—half beer, half cream soda—in his hand, standing in the kitchen doorway.
“You know,” Lily went on, not really looking up at him, “the new family, the new people. The mother who lives with that girl over the liquor store. In Tess’s class, the one she walks to school with now and then.”
“I’m not sure which girl that is,” Victor said.
“Oh, yes, you do, you know the people. I feel sorry for that girl. There’s something about her. Something so sad. They are nice, actually. The mother—she has an odd name, Clarice—she works for Dr. Reiss. I’ve spoken with her from time to time when I call for appointments. She has the nicest things to say about Tessie. I think they’re just, well, poor. Down on their luck.”
Victor pondered this while Lily made her case. “Oh, yes, I met her, didn’t I, Tessie? A few weeks ago. The mother and girl who live across from the repair shop.”
“I don’t think they live there anymore,” I said, looking up from my homework. “They’ve moved to one of those houses just past the railroad trestle.”
“Well, that’s good,” Lily said. “I’m sure it’s better over there.”
“And the father?” Victor asked. “Has anybody met him?”
Lily shrugged. “There doesn’t seem to be a father.”
“Margaret talks about him all the time, but I’ve never seen him,” I offered.
“Well, I think we should invite the mother.” Lily flipped through her cookbooks, scribbling down future menus.
“So then, yes, why not. Have them over.” My father disappeared back into the kitchen with his Cincinnati.
“Don’t you think we should have something small, something simple?”
“Sure,” my father called, “whatever suits you.” But something always came up and Lily never quite got around to making the phone call, inviting them over. She thought about it, the way my mother thought about everything, mulling it over, thinking it through, weighing the pros and cons, then forgot about the idea for a long, long time.
* * *
We lived a block or so from the railroad tracks on the south side of town. During the day when I wandered around, I liked to walk along the tracks, where I found the crushed remains of birds and squirrels. Once I found a cat cut right in two.
As soon as I crossed under the trestle, I found myself in the part of town where the houses were small and gray with front porches with broken screens, tricycles on the front lawns, laundry hung out to dry in the warmer months. The Skid Row of Winonah, my father called it.
There were smells I couldn’t quite recognize but they left an oily taste in my mouth and there were garbage cans you could see, not hidden in a big bin like ours were. I don’t even remember my parents ever taking out the garbage, though of course they must have, but here you could see it in cans that lined the sides of the houses, sometimes spilling over the tops. Often I saw men in uniforms coming in and out of these houses and they weren’t coming to fix things, but actually lived here.
It was to this row of gray houses with battered front porches that Clarice Blair settled with Margaret a year or so after she’d arrived in Winonah. She’d taken a job as a receptionist for Dr. Reiss, a dentist who worked out west near Crestwood, and I guess she’d done well enough to move. It wasn’t the house on the lake that Margaret said she’d once lived in, but it wasn’t over Santini’s Liquor Store either.
You could tell that Clarice had tried to fix the place up because the porch screens were repaired and she’d painted the house white. Though there wasn’t any trash on her lawn and she had even planted a few pink and white flowers out front, there was plenty of trash on the lawns around hers so it seemed a little pointless. She’d tried to make the house look pretty, but it still looked shabby like the others around it, as if it were going to fall down.
Whenever Clarice or Margaret saw me walking by, they invited me inside. It seemed as if I couldn’t walk down this road without being seen by one of them. I had a feeling after a while that they were waiting for me. Usually Margaret came onto the porch to greet me, then asked me to come inside and play.
The house was small and smelled like cats, but Mrs. Blair had tried to make it cozy. Pictures of dogs and flowers hung on the walls. There were toys in corners and a few potted plants by the windows and one plant I liked very much, with long, purplish-green tentacles, that hung in the kitchen and Mrs. Blair told me was called a Wandering Jew, which I thought was a strange name for a plant. “Just like you, Tessie,” Mrs. Blair said, “always wandering around.”
Whenever I stopped by, or whenever they spotted me walking and called me in, Clarice Blair always gave us milk and a plate of cookies and then Margaret would ask me to go upstairs into her room. Margaret’s room was done up nicely with pink bedspreads and white curtains. But Margaret never wanted to just sit in the sun and gossip about the boys the way the rest of the gang did. Margaret had elaborate scenes she liked to act out. Pioneer sisters was one of her favorites. I was a sick sister who had to be nursed back to health and only Margaret could do this, pressing poultices to my head. She liked to save me more than she liked having me save her. She wanted me to do dramatic things that went against my nature—stagger into the room, collapse breathlessly upon the bed so she could rush to my side and lament. Once real tears coursed down her cheeks, which I thought was taking the game too far.
When we played pioneer sisters, she had calico skirts and bonnets we had to put on. Or satin and tulle skirts if we were princesses. When we were princesses, we were sentenced to the Tower and only Margaret knew how we’d escape. These games were complete with informants, guards, and go-betweens, often played by Margaret as well, and we played them as if they were not games at all, but something very real.
Before I left, Clarice Blair always made a point of telling me how much she appreciated that I was friends with Margaret; how much that meant to her. She said that Margaret hadn’t had an easy time because they had moved around so much and that sometimes little girls misunderstood her. I was ashamed when Clarice Blair said these things to me and I hoped when I left the house that none of the gang would ever know I went there.
* * *
To get from my house to Margaret’s you had to walk a block or two, then pass under the railroad trestle. It was just a viaduct. The trestle itself led to a big turnabout where engines could be turned around. Before Margaret came to Winonah, I never walked on the trestle because it was a bridge and if a train were coming, there was nowhere to go. Some of the boys—the bad boys who hung out at the Idiot’s Circle, that small circle of grass at the train station where boys with nothing better to do sat and smoked and drank beer after school—raced the trains across the trestle, but no girls did. My brother Jeb came home with stories about boys who almost didn’t make it, boys who’d had to make a dive for the bushes. The most I ever did was put a nickel on the tracks and see how flat it came out after the train rode over it.
But Margaret, once she’d moved from Santini’s to the house near the trestle, always dared us to go with her to play there. She taunted us. She stood in the middle of the trestle, waving her arms. “What is it with you guys? You so scared?” We got tired of her taunting and agreed to go along.
The first few times we crossed the railroad trestle, we dashed across. But Margaret stood in the middle, arms akimbo, laughing her high-pitched laugh. She stood there, her black hair blowing in the breeze, her olive skin looking so sleek and smooth, and you almost had the feeling that she could stop a locomotive if one came barreling down on her.
In October we had a burst of Indian summer and the knowledge that the warmth and freshness in the air were the last hint of summer we’d have before winter set in. We wanted to take the long way home, to meander through the ravines one last time before they were filled with ice and snow. I was the only one who knew the routes the way Margaret did and together we ambled through the ravines, soaking our shoes, but we didn’t care. The air was w
arm and the sunlight shone through the maples that had already turned gold. Scanning the ground, we searched for arrowheads but found none.
We walked until we came to Lincoln, past the library, the police station, under the trestle to where the old turnabout was. We lingered here, tossing stones, and when we looked up, we heard Margaret calling to us. “Last one across the railroad bridge gets a free milk shake.” That was always the dare, not to be the first, but the last.
Because I lived so close to the tracks, I knew the times of the trains. I could recite them in my sleep. The 8:05, the 9:32, the 10:27, and so on. I was used to the bell ringing, the gates going down. “The four twenty-four is due,” I said, but Margaret laughed and raced up the grassy embankment to the trestle. We scrambled on with her and then started to run. But in the middle we paused because Margaret had some nickels and pennies she wanted to place on the tracks. She was meticulously lining up her coins when I heard the train whistle.
“Run, Tessie,” Vicky, who was already across the railroad bridge, shouted. “Tessie, run!”
Behind me the 4:24 was barreling down. I ran as fast as I’ve ever run before or since. The train seemed to be gaining on me and I heard its whistle blow as if it were right inside my head. I ran perhaps only twenty yards or so before I dove for the bushes, breathless, my heart pounding.
Even as the train approached the trestle, its horn blaring, I heard that sharp, staccato laughter. That ta-ta-ta, almost like an opera singer during a mad scene. “Oh, Tessie,” Margaret shouted from the middle of the railroad bridge, “you looked so funny and you had it beat by a mile.”
When we turned, we saw Margaret standing there, arms outstretched, black hair waving in the breeze. Her eyes were shut tight and she seemed to be taking enormous pleasure in the moment. I shouted to her, “Margaret, run, run!”
When it already seemed too late, as if all were lost, she began to run. She dashed across the bridge and just as the train seemed about to run over her, its whistle blaring, she dove for the bushes. She lay there, still, and we thought she was unconscious or even dead. Blood trickled from scratches along the side of her face. Other cuts bled on her hands where she’d landed in the briars.
“Oh, my God,” said Samantha Crawford, who was always a little afraid. “What’re we going to do?”
“She’s fine,” I said, “she’s just faking it.” I shook and shook her, but she didn’t move.
“We should go get help,” Vicky said.
“I’ll go,” Lori Martin, with her take-charge attitude, said. Just as Lori dashed off, Margaret opened her eyes and laughed that high-pitched laugh. “Fooled you, didn’t I?” she said, laughing as blood trickled down her cheek.
“It’s not funny,” I told her. “We thought you were hurt.”
“Oh, Tessie,” Margaret said, “you take things too seriously.”
One night, just a few days later, Margaret came to my window and tossed pebbles until I came down. I was still angry with her for the trick she’d pulled on the tracks and I told her so. “I’m sorry, Tessie. It’s just that you guys seemed so scared.”
We sat down together on the grass and she picked a blade, made a whistle of it between her teeth. I plucked a blade and tried to whistle through it, but I couldn’t get that high, piercing sound Margaret got with hers.
In the distance we heard the 8:35 rushing through, announcing my bedtime. “Have you ever had this sensation?” Margaret asked me. “You are sitting in a train in the station and the train next to you starts to move. You think you’re the one who’s moving when, in fact, you’re standing still.”
I told her I couldn’t remember ever having had that sensation.
“Well, when you have it,” she said, getting up to leave, “you’ll know.”
* * *
Those were the last warm days of fall and then winter was upon us. It seemed an especially hard winter that year. The snow drifts were six feet high and we had to wade through them to school. I stayed inside more than I wanted and found it confining, as did my brothers. So we were relieved in January when there was a thaw. An unusual warm spell, you could never predict. The temperature rose and the snow melted. Big soggy pools of it. There was mud on the lawns. Puddles to jump in, splash through. For days we frolicked. Went to school in our shirtsleeves with just windbreakers on. We played ball, skipped, and the air had the green freshness of spring, as if the flowers would pop out of the ground, and the woods behind our house were carpeted in jack-in-the-pulpits.
Then one night it began to rain. We were asleep so we hardly noticed the rain or the temperature falling. It dropped steadily in the night so that before dawn a freezing rain was falling and by morning it was a glazed-over world. Everything white and shiny, slippery to the touch.
The power lines were down. There was no heat. Our father built a fire in the fireplace in the middle of the day, and we toasted wieners, marshmallows, whatever could be toasted over the flame. We huddled by the fire while my father thought about what we should do because it was all slick outside and nowhere to go.
When I pressed my face to the glass, my steamy breath made little snowflakes, and when I wiped it away, there she was. Skating on our lawn, up and down our driveway. “Look at that,” our father said.
I wiped the glass, pressed my face closer, and saw for myself. Margaret was skating across our lawn in long, even glides. When she saw us at the window, she beckoned for me to join her. “Well,” my father said, laughing, “you’ve got to go out there.”
At first I was reluctant, but then I put my skates on. Together we skated up and down on the lawn, then on the streets, my parents gazing at us through the frosty glass.
* * *
In the spring of that year when the air was fresh and there was a hint of leaves and grass—you could already feel things starting to grow—my mother told me that we were having company for dinner. She didn’t say who, except that it was a surprise. She told me I should go upstairs and get cleaned up. Since we often had company for dinner on the weekends when my father was home, I wasn’t particularly curious, though I always wanted to know what we were eating.
Soon the house was filled with the bustle of preparations. We had “help”—a grumpy older woman named Emma who came in a white uniform when there were parties—and my mother told her exactly what to do. My mother fluttered through the kitchen, her hands flying as she chopped something. She could whip up just about anything in half a second. She made creamed spinach I can still taste, buttery and smooth. She fried fish with almonds and brown butter so it came out so crunchy you’d never know it was fish. It wasn’t like other houses, where you got meatloaf every night of the week. People loved to come to our house.
When I asked who was coming, Lily looked distracted. My mother always seemed to have a million things to do, but if people were coming over, she never stopped until the party was over. The freckles on her nose glistened with sweat as she pushed a strand of hair, which I noticed for the first time was turning gray, off her face. Her hands arched over whatever she was chopping. Nobody, she said, just a few friends.
I didn’t bother asking how “nobody” could be friends, but I was surprised when I found Clarice Blair sitting in our living room with a cocktail napkin on her lap. She wore dark stockings and a short black cocktail dress. She had this funny hat on with a veil that looked ridiculous to me, as if she were coming to a funeral, not a dinner party. Her dress was straight and tight and she had difficulty keeping her legs together. She had great legs, legs Margaret would eventually inherit, and she kept swishing them back in forth in a single motion.
We had other people over as well—a golf partner of my father’s and Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie from next door, who was blind as a bat, and Mr. and Mrs. Lerner, whose daughter was known for doing things with boys after basketball games, though these parents obviously didn’t have a clue. While I was passing out a tray (my mother made me do stuff like this) with little cheese puffs, I heard Mr. Lerner say to Mr. McKenzie, “I can�
��t tell you how many friends we have who don’t even know they need an oil change.” This was hardly my mother’s A list of friends, not that she exactly had an A list, but my mother was a good hostess and she treated everybody, even the man who mowed the lawn, like equals, no matter what she thought about them or said behind their backs.
There were many stories circulating about Clarice Blair. Everyone wondered who she was and where she’d come from. It had never made sense that a white woman with a child would come to town and live above Santini’s. People hinted that there’d never been any husband. I’d heard mothers talking over coffee: She acted like a lady, but she didn’t live like one. Some said she was running away. That she was a tramp. I’d heard women say that they should be careful with someone like that in town.
But as my father sat next to her, playing host, I saw a thin, small woman with an oversized laugh who put Hershey’s Kisses in her daughter’s lunch and gave me fresh-baked cookies and cold milk when I walked by her rented house. She had eyes like someone asking a judge for mercy. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for her and I guess my mother did since she had invited her.
My father could be a very good host, offering people drinks, making sure they had cheese puffs and cucumber sandwiches on their hors d’oeuvre plate. “Clarice, would you like another martini?” he asked. “Clarice, more cheese and crackers?” He passed her a tray. He made small talk with her about the kids and school and those kinds of safe things adults talk about when they don’t know what else to talk about. “Oh, yes,” I heard him say, “you really can’t be too careful these days.”
Careful about what? I wondered as I watched Mrs. Blair cross and uncross her legs awkwardly as she tried to maneuver a little hors d’oeuvre plate and a drink. My father was talking to her about his work. About the disasters he’d seen. When the tornado chased him down the road; the river that carried an entire living room set, one piece at a time, downstream. At each disaster she put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, and then what happened,” over and over, still balancing her martini and plate on her lap.