Harry Sue

by Sue Stauffacher

  “To speak to a customer service representative, press nine.”

  A tight band pressed around my chest. There was a clicking noise and I heard the soothing lady come back on. She said, “Connecting to an operator. Your call may be monitored to ensure quality service.”

  “They’re connecting me,” I told Homer.

  “Jeez, it takes long enough.” He’d been straining in his bed for so long he had to relax back onto his pillows.

  I started to ask him just what I was supposed to say, expecting more music or the nice lady or just waiting. But I heard another voice, a real voice I had to strain to understand because she spoke with a heavy accent.

  “Welcome to the Wisconsin State Lottery,” she said. “My name is Consuela. How may I help you?”

  “Uh …” I looked at Homer helplessly. Was I really supposed to spill my guts?

  “Yes?” the voice with the name Consuela said.

  “Consuela, are you … do you … ?”

  “Are you having some trouble with the system?” Consuela prompted.

  It took me a second to figure out what she said because it sounded like “see-stem.”

  “It’s just …” I glanced helplessly at Homer, who was mouthing the word “mom.”

  “I’m looking for my mom,” I said in a rush. “She’s a conette.”

  There was a long pause. “Dios mio,” Consuela said. Then the clicking noise. Then the nice lady. “If you feel you have reached this number in error …”

  I pressed the “end” button on the phone.

  “What? What?” Homer asked, all excited. He was using his shoulder to get a little leverage, bouncing his head back and forth. It was how he underlined his words. How he said, I really want this!

  “She hung up on me,” I said.

  Homer made me repeat the conversation word for word, including all the selection options.

  “Dios mio,” he said slowly. “That means ‘my God.’”

  He smiled and gave me his “aha” look. “Consuela’s going to help us,” he said.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “She said, ‘My God.’ It’s hardly like saying, ‘Get lost, kid.’”

  “But she hung up on me.”

  “So?”

  “I see that as a sign of rejection.”

  Homer sighed. “Harry Sue, you’ve got to have patience.”

  He nestled back into his pillows, smiling. “We’ll call her again tomorrow.”

  Chapter 17

  I didn’t get home in time to see the kids off. Sink and Dip had just finished painting their nails and were eating the leftover snacks, pushing stick pretzels to the edge of the counter with their palms and pinching them so as not to disturb the drying polish.

  Hunger squeezed my stomach as I opened the fridge, looking for something decent to eat. I was inspecting a piece of American cheese for fuzz when Granny burst through the door, looking like she wanted to bust some heads.

  “I tell ya, that nigra’s movin’ in!” she shouted at no one in particular.

  Sink looked at Dip and rolled her eyes.

  “Now, Gran,” she said. “Maybe he’s the gardener.”

  To Dip, she said, “Gran seen him through her binoculars this morning cutting the grass down the block.”

  “That house that’s been vacant?” Dip asked. “But Granny, you said you didn’t care who lived there long as somebody started taking care of the place.”

  “I draw the line at nigras!” Granny whirled around to face Sink, her eyes wild.

  “He was carrying a chair. Into the house!” she screamed, like that was a federal crime. “What kind of lousy gardener carries chairs?”

  Dip was rubbing at her eye and forgot the nail polish, smearing it on her cheek.

  “Gran!” she complained.

  But old Granny was far away, being consumed by her discovery. She slammed the carpetbag she called a purse onto the counter and fished out her cell phone.

  “Put on Eunice Baker,” she shouted into the phone. “Eunice, you old windbag. I told you that nigra was moving in this morning. Now what’s gonna happen to these house prices?”

  Granny paused and we heard the whine that was Eunice’s voice, trying to calm her down. “What difference does it make if he’s African? Where I come from, black is black!”

  She listened a minute longer before throwing the phone back into her purse in disgust.

  Granny was old-school, born in Detroit to a family who settled there long before black people moved up north in search of work in what we learned in school was the Great Migration. Sometimes she even called it Old Detroit, and we all knew what she meant. She meant white Detroit. If we’d been on speaking terms, I might have mentioned that the Indians were here even before Detroit came along.

  Granny’s hate was so bad it was illegal, Fish. If black people showed up at our door looking for day care, Granny told them she was just full that morning. Got her reported once when the very same lady called that afternoon and Granny said she had three openings.

  Funny how her hate sometimes worked in my favor. Because of Granny’s preferences, I knew a whole mess of crumb snatchers were safe from her wicked ways. Me, I didn’t have a preference, but Beau says in the joint, you hang with your own kind. Black with black, white with white, Asian with Asian, Latino with Latino.

  I spent considerable time figuring that out. Seems to me, we all bleed red. But then again, I don’t make the rules. I’ll just have to live by them.

  “His name is Mr. Olatanju,” I told Sink and Dip, surprising myself by pronouncing it perfectly.

  Now that I had everyone’s attention, I took my time giving up the information. I’d moved along to a piece of bread and started pinching off the green spots.

  “He’s my new art teacher,” I added.

  Granny looked pretty cheesed off to have her information confirmed. Far as I remember, she only had three looks: “mad as hell,” “scheming,” and “lovable-but-worn-out day-care provider.” She started using her purse to do a bicep curl. Whenever she was really worked up, Granny started pumping stuff. I’ve seen her do a grab and lift with a seventy-pound crumb snatcher who accidentally pulled a few flowers while weeding the front garden. She had worked up quite a sweat by the time the doorbell rang.

  Granny disappeared into the hall. First we heard the door swing open, then the sound of something breaking into pieces on the cement front stoop.

  Then Granny’s voice: “Don’t try to give me any of that poison African crap,” she screamed. “You! You go back where you came from. We don’t mix with nigras and you’re blacker than most. Now go on off my porch. Don’t want no nigras round here.”

  I had crept into the hall to get another look at my teacher as he towered over Granny. His head was down, looking at his hands.

  “I was told that you have been asking about me.” He spoke slowly. “Knowing how you feel, it must be a relief to discover up close that I am not black.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Granny spit out. She was on her guard.

  “For myself, I was much relieved …,” he continued, looking now into the distance, ignoring her question. It wasn’t hard to trump Granny in the thought department, especially when she was mad. I inched closer, still staying out of sight.

  “You see, I have a habit of disliking cranky women, white women who throw down my cooking without a taste. Yes, it’s true. I have a real prejudice against bitter, dried-up shrews. But seeing up close that you are not white gives me much relief as well.”

  There was a grittiness in his voice like the teeth in the back of his mouth were touching when he spoke. I realized that if I came forward at that moment, he would hate me now, as he hated Granny, would think of us as road dogs and mark me as his enemy.

  And today wouldn’t be such an awful waste.

  So why was it so hard to pull myself forward and into the light and to pretend that Granny was in my crew? I held back. But then I told myself that this African
was slow to hate, and desperate times call for desperate measures, which is something I read in a book somewhere and, unfortunately, had a lot of cause to remember.

  So I did it.

  “Harry Sue?” he said, sounding all confused.

  I sure did like the way he said my name. And then he surprised me with a smile, a big one, like he was seeing an old friend, and he held out his hand to me, but Granny slapped it away.

  “Nobody touches her,” Granny said. “And I’m as white as they come, you dirty nigra. Don’t you dare say I ain’t. I’m an American!”

  He kept looking at me and smiling, as if her words were having no effect on him whatsoever.

  Just before she slammed the door, he said quietly: “This explains much, my friend.”

  And to Granny, through the door: “You may keep the dish. It is a present from Sudan.”

  Sink and Dip had crept up behind us. Granny ordered Sink to get the broom.

  When Sink came back with it, Granny said, “Get somebody out there to pick up that crap.”

  Sink turned to me and started to repeat Granny’s words. Normally, I’d just let the broom and dustpan clatter to the floor, but not today. I was curious.

  I went outside. I picked at the big pieces of pottery. They were burnt orange, like the color of the sun just before it slides off the earth in the summer. And there was such a smell there, like dirt after a rain. Only sweeter. It made my stomach put up quite a fuss. So I pinched a chunk of meat that lay in one of the bigger pieces of the dish and put it in my mouth. It melted on my tongue, sweet and hot and tender. I took another piece of something green: a pepper, I think, and it tasted the same, only with a bit of crunch. I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the slice of bread I’d been working on when Mr. Olatanju arrived at the door. I dipped it in some of the gravy, careful not to eat anything that had touched the ground. It made even Granny’s stale white bread taste like a holiday.

  I glanced up to see her peering down at me through the little window in the front door. I heard her slide in the dead bolt, locking me out.

  I just gave Granny a big smile and took another bite.

  Chapter 18

  “Now, Harry Sue, honey, you’re not going to break the law or hurt any innocent children with this, are you?” Mrs. Dinkins asked as she handed me a big creased grocery bag folded down and held together with a chip clip.

  We were standing in her kitchen and, with the light streaming in, I noticed how faded it had all become. Her clothes, the curtains, even the counter-tops and the plates looked like they’d been there in just that position for more years than I’d been on this earth.

  She was wearing the loose shirt and baggy khaki pants I’d seen on her a hundred times before. It made me think that she probably hadn’t gone shopping for anything new to wear since the day the phone call came in from the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department.

  “Mrs. Dinkins,” I said, forcing myself to breathe in. “The only people I hurt are the ones who deserve it. It’s called the school of hard knocks. There are just some people who need to learn that Harry Sue doesn’t take it on the chin.”

  But Homer’s mom wasn’t listening. She was kneading her shoulder and looking out the window in the direction of the tree house.

  “She’s up there again,” she said, worry stirring up the words. “That therapy woman. She’s got ideas, Harry Sue. Things she wants to try on Christopher. But I don’t know about all that. Gettin’ his hopes up. Comin’ down is so hard.”

  But I wasn’t really listening to her, either. I was wondering if you could suffocate on dust. There was so much dust here, hanging heavy in the air. The sun pointed to it. I knew if I grabbed the curtains, they would cough dust. The whole house was covered in an avalanche of dust….

  I needed air, so I held up the bag and said, “Thanks for this, and don’t worry, Mrs. Dinkins,” knowing full well that was like telling a shark not to swim. Worry was how she got from four-thirty to five-fifteen and from five-fifteen to six-thirty.

  But right now I couldn’t attend to Mrs. Dinkins. I needed to see Homer and to tell him about what had happened with Granny and the art teacher. I wanted to tell him how you could win a fight with Granny without throwing a punch, how Mr. Olatanju had scored a KO by telling Granny she wasn’t white, which was pretty much the same as if he’d caught her on the chin.

  Yes, I knew J-Cat was there. Hadn’t I seen the Volvo, two tires over the curb? I put the bag in my teeth, unhooked the rope, and started to climb, hoping she was nearly through turning Homer and airing his butt. But as I got near to the hatch, I heard a sound like my worst nightmare exploding in my ears. It was coming from Homer, coming from his throat. He was coughing on something and he couldn’t even turn himself over.

  As soon as I hauled myself into the tree house, I bit down on the chip clip out of shock, spilling Mrs. Dinkins’s bra, the batteries, the tennis balls, and the wire all over the floor. That’s because, before I even got a glimpse of Homer, I saw J-Cat, spread-eagled on the other side of the picture window. Her ugly sundress flapped around her bony knees, which were making two red circles on the glass. She was doing something that little kids do, smushing her face into the glass, making her lips look like helpless worms, her nose like a prizefighter’s.

  And Homer … Homer was laughing.

  I lay on the floor, panting, relief and anger competing inside me.

  “Harry Sue? You okay?” Homer was craning his neck to see me.

  I pulled myself up and stood next to his head. “I just thought … the noise …”

  I stopped and looked up at J-Cat, who’d made both hands into circles and was looking through them at me like she was peering through a pair of binoculars.

  How could I tell Homer I didn’t recognize the sound of his laughter?

  Chapter 19

  “Harry Sue’s got boobs! Would ya look at those?”

  My new figure was causing quite a stir as we lined up for class the next morning.

  “Yeah, right,” Nick Nederman said. “That’s a boob job. You can’t grow those things overnight.”

  Waterhead. Like he knew what he was talking about.

  Ms. Lanier looked me over. She knew there was more to my hooters than the hard round bumps that met her eye. But the morning bell rang and there was milk money to collect and attendance to take and a whole list of other boring teacher-type things to attend to.

  I just smiled and waited for the thoughts to connect in Jolly Roger’s small brain that, come recess time, he should grab hold of my bra strap and give it a good yank.

  I’ll tell you one thing, with all the itching and the adjusting, I have no idea whatsoever why girls make such a fuss over growing these things.

  Meanwhile, Violet was mooning over me like I was her new boyfriend.

  “Ma says we’re gonna have you over for dinner, Harry Sue, for a thank-you.” She leaned in close to me and whispered, “You like chicken-fried steak? What you got stuffed in there, anyway? I put a little Kleenex in mine sometimes, but that’s not really cheating. Rosejane says they got padded ones with little foam things called ‘cookies’ down at Sears in the Marshfield Mall, but Ma says I might as well wait until the real ones show up, else why do people always want to invite trouble?”

  My, she rattled on, bumpin’ her gums about every imaginable thing. I realized then I didn’t have to worry so much about punishing myself for saving her. Having to listen to Violet go on about brassieres and foam cookies might just be worse than lockdown.

  We were inside by now, sitting at our desks. Ms. Lanier was up front working out a math problem. As if the numbers weren’t confusing enough, now she was adding letters to the mix.

  “If x equals six,” she said.

  My question was this: If x equals six, why don’t people just say so and be done with it? And while we’re at it, what worldly purpose does a girl like Violet Chump serve? She couldn’t KO a baby bunny, nor did she have the sense of a chicken-fried steak. I mean, the Scare
crow in The Wizard of Oz had more brains than her with just straw stuffed in a burlap sack.

  I sighed, thinking about the long road ahead of me. I can tell you right now, it wasn’t made of yellow brick. Not since I got me another misfit for my crew, somebody I’d have to protect from Jolly Roger, somebody whose tears I’d be mopping up with the worn-out hem of my skirt.

  That’s the kind of reward I get when I stick my neck out.

  Still and all, I thought, trying to look at the bright side, I was partial to edible food of any kind and chicken-fried steak, just the idea of it, was making my mouth water. I never did figure how Dorothy got to be so plump and rosy-cheeked. If you read that book, you’ll see for yourself all she ever eats until she gets to Oz is nuts and bread and a piece of fruit now and then. I rubbed at the tennis balls banded against my chest to relieve the terrible itch and settled in until recess.

  In the joint, you get respect for being plain. Harry Sue does not play mind games. She lets you know right up front when it’s on. That way, you can decide whether to put it down and back away or enter in of your own free will. I always gave the boys a taste of what they had coming. That way, if they decided to bite, it was their own fool business.

  At recess, those boys circled around me like a pack of hungry wolves.

  “Nice potatoes, Harry Sue. I guess you really are a girl.”

  “And a fine girl like me deserves to be treated with a little respect,” I said, rearranging my boobies. “So don’t be touching any parts of me or you’re in for the shock of your life.”

  “Not much of a shock to discover them things aren’t real,” Nick said. Thought he was a regular PhD, Nick did. I knew a cell warrior when I saw one. Got lots to say in a crowd, but get him alone with a shank at his throat and he’ll PC up in a hurry.

  “I’m talking a real shock here. Watts, amps, sizzle.”