“Yes, but I like this even better.”
Mama sighed. “We can’t get both of them. Are you sure you want this blue over any purple?”
Absolutely! “I’m sure.” Lily had never been more sure of anything. This was the most beautiful fabric she had ever seen.
Mama drew the bolt of fabric out and placed it on the counter. “I’ll take four yards of this too,” she said. Lily watched as the shopkeeper measured the fabric and cut it. The pair of scissors slid effortlessly through the fabric, like it was cutting butter. It even sounded different while it was being cut than the other fabrics did.
After Mama had paid the shopkeeper for all the fabric, they walked back to the car.
Mr. Tanner had been reading a book while he waited and set it down when Mama and Lily climbed into the car. “Where to?”
“Home,” Mama said.
Lily was glad. She hoped Mama would start sewing her beautiful new dress as soon as they got home. She would even offer to help, though she didn’t like to sew. She planned to wear this dress to church next Sunday—her very first church service as a ten-year-old.
As soon as the car pulled into the driveway, Lily didn’t bother to wait for Mama to pay Mr. Tanner. She quickly ran to the house and spread her fabric out on the table. She found a big envelope in Mama’s basket marked “Lily’s dress pattern, age ten.” She took Mama’s good fabric scissors from the sewing table and set everything on the table so Mama could get right to work the minute she got into the house.
Mama’s eyes opened wide in surprise when she came inside and saw the table. “I’m sorry, Lily,” she said. “But that dress will have to wait a little while yet. I want to make a black dress for you first. It’s always important to have a black dress ready to wear.”
What? Lily was disappointed. She did not like to wear black. The only time she wore black was at communion or baptism services in church or when there was a funeral. All boring, boring, boring. Wearing black meant solemn occasions. Lily would rather feel light and happy, not sad or solemn.
A few days later, Lily came home from school and found her aquamarine fabric turned into a dress, waiting on her bed. It was so beautiful! Lily hung it carefully inside her closet and closed the door. No—that wouldn’t do for such a lovely dress. It was a shame to hide a bright blue dress inside a closet. She opened the door and took out the dress to hang on a hook on the wall. She sat on the edge of her bed, admiring her choice. The beautiful aqua blue shimmered in the sunlight. She could hardly wait until Sunday.
She spent some time imagining the conversation that would go on about this dress. They would all admire it. Beth and Cousin Hannah would say they hoped their mothers would make one just like it and Effie would sniff and say she was glad she would never wear such a fancy color. Lily knew her well enough to know that was Effie’s way of saying she wanted it.
Oh, Lily hoped nobody died before Sunday! How terrible it would be to have to wear black instead of this lovely dress.
Lily counted down the days until Sunday. Every time she heard a buggy on the road, she held her breath until it passed by. Then she knew it wasn’t someone coming to visit with bad news about someone dying.
Finally, finally! Sunday morning arrived. Lily slipped into her new dress and Mama helped her with all the pins. Lily loved how the fabric felt. It was soft and slippery and made a swishing noise when she walked.
She sat like a statue on the buggy seat to make sure nothing happened to her dress before they got to church. Papa stopped in front of the house where church would be held. Ever so carefully, Lily climbed out of the back of the buggy and stood waiting until Mama got out with baby Paul in her arms. They walked into the house together to join the women and girls in the kitchen. Joseph and Dannie went with Papa to unhitch Jim. Then they would stand outside and visit with the rest of the men and boys until it was time for church to start.
All of Lily’s friends oohed and aahed over her new blue dress—all except Effie, of course. They pinched her arm lightly just like the big girls did whenever someone wore a new dress for the first time.
Lily followed Mama to shake all the women’s and girls’ hands. This time, instead of standing next to Mama while they waited until it was time to file to their seats, she went to stand with the girls. Everyone was visiting softly but for once Lily couldn’t think of anything to say. It all seemed too strange. Not being with Mama. Wearing her new grown-up dress. She felt odd, like her tummy was doing somersaults.
Benches had been set up in the living room. The women filed in but Lily stood and waited with the rest of the girls until it was time for them to file in. The men came in next, then the girls lined up—oldest ones first.
Once again, Lily was the youngest. She stood at the very end of the line. They filed in front of the ministers and walked along the side of the room and sat on the benches behind the men. Lily’s heart felt like it was thumping loudly in her chest—Ba bump! Ba bump! Ba bump! Surely everyone could hear it. It all seemed so strange, she almost wished she could turn back the clock a week and be nine years old, seated next to Mama again. But that would never happen. She was ten now. Practically all grown up.
The boys filed in last, oldest to youngest, and sat behind the girls. After everyone had a seat, the bishop cleared his throat and solemnly announced that it was time for church to begin. Always, always so solemn.
The song leader called out the page for the first song. Effie opened the hymnbook and shared it with Lily. Effie was acting very sweet, which Lily thought was a nice surprise for her birthday. Lily tried to hold still and sing but her new dress was beginning to feel uncomfortable. The apron belt felt pinned so firmly around her waist, like a tight cinch. When she moved too quickly, she felt pricked by the points of pins. How did her friends get used to this? She thought wistfully of her loose, comfortable little-girl dresses. Growing up wasn’t quite as much fun as she thought it would be.
After church was over, Lily followed the other girls upstairs to sit and visit while the women prepared lunch. Malinda ran to join them. “Oh, Lily! There is something on your new dress!”
“Where?” Lily asked.
Malinda pointed to Lily’s backside. “Where you sit.”
Lily backed up to a mirror and peered over her shoulder to see what was on her dress. A big wad of gum! Her heart sank.
Lily reached back and tried to remove it but it was stuck firmly. Beth and Hannah came over to see what was wrong, but they didn’t know what to do about it either. Effie seemed pleased and Lily wanted to smack her. Effie had been chewing a big wad of Bazooka bubble gum before church.
“I’ll go get your mama,” Hannah said. She disappeared down the stairs and a minute later she came back with Mama.
Mama looked at the wad of gum and shook her head. “It looks as if you have been sitting on it all morning,” she said. She tried to pick some of it off but only a few little bits came off and the rest stayed stuck tight. “We’ll have to wait until we get home to get it out.”
Cousin Hannah offered to walk right behind Lily so nobody could see the gum when it was time to go eat.
Lily was glad when Mama came to say that it was time to go home. She was exhausted. This first day of wearing a grown-up outfit and sitting with the girls had been a huge disappointment.
As soon as they got home, Lily changed her clothes and took her new dress downstairs. “Today is Sunday,” Mama reminded her when Lily asked her if they could remove the gum right away. “We can try to remove it tomorrow, but I’m afraid there will be a stain there even if I can remove the gum.”
Oh no! Lily hadn’t thought about a stain. Maybe if she prayed and asked God to make sure the gum would all come out nicely she wouldn’t have to worry about it. She was worrying quite a bit about this dress.
When Lily came home from school on Monday, she found Mama at the sewing machine with Lily’s dress. Lily was almost afraid of what Mama was doing. She wouldn’t look. She wouldn’t look. She looked.
Oh . . . no. A patch! Mama was sewing a patch on Lily’s dress.
“I’m so sorry, Lily,” Mama said. “When I tried to remove the gum, the fabric tore.”
How awful! Tears welled up in Lily’s eyes.
“You can still wear it for everyday,” Mama said, a little too brightly. “I should have listened to my instincts and encouraged you to get a more practical fabric at the fabric shop. This can serve as a good lesson that we should think more carefully before we buy something.”
Lily didn’t think that was the lesson to learn. She thought the only lesson would be to look first and make sure there was no gum and no Effie anywhere before she sat down.
30
Stuck in the Basement with Aaron Yoder
On a Friday afternoon, Teacher Rhoda told the students to put away their books for recess. It was the first warm day of spring, and the sunshine was beckoning for the students to come play in it. Lily couldn’t wait to run outside.
Instead, Teacher Rhoda made a terrible announcement. “It’s time for some serious cleaning of the schoolhouse,” she said cheerfully. Aaron Yoder groaned out loud. Sam Stoltzfus clunked his head against his desk.
Teacher Rhoda drew a box from her bottom drawer. It held little pieces of paper with all the cleaning chores written on them. One by one, the children walked up to her desk and drew a slip of paper out of the box. Lily was very disappointed that recess would be spent cleaning, but she hoped at the very least that she would get to dust the erasers or wash the blackboard. Those were her two favorite chores. Her least favorite was to mop the floor and her very least favorite was to clean the basement. She shuddered. Too many spiders in the basement.
Oh no! Lily’s paper read “Clean the basement.” She would have to sweep it, shake the rugs, and then dump buckets of water on the floor and sweep it down the drain. Awful!
Then came even worse news. Aaron Yoder drew the same assignment. He and Lily would have to work together in the basement. The happiness she had felt about this beautiful sunny day plunged. It was turning into a terrible day.
As soon as everyone had their assigned chores, the children got right to work. Some children swept the schoolhouse, while others waited to mop until they were done. Some washed windows and scrubbed down the shelves that held the lunch boxes. Feeling sorry for herself, Lily trudged down the stairs to join horrible Aaron and sweep the basement.
Silently, Aaron and Lily set to work. Lily swept as fast as she could, sweeping up a dust cloud in the air. Aaron held the dustpan for her while she swept the big dirt pile into it. Next it was time to wash the floor. They filled several buckets with water and swooshed it over the floor. They swished their brooms back and forth, back and forth, scrubbing as they went. It was a blur of motion, and they didn’t talk to each other, didn’t even look at each other. So far, so good.
As usual, Aaron had to ruin everything. “I’m going to make you topple right over.” He started swishing the broom toward Lily’s feet.
Lily did the best she could to try to ignore him. She kept moving her feet away from Aaron’s broom, but then he hit her feet hard. She slipped on the wet floor and fell down hard, hitting her head as she fell. Lily lay flat on the floor, trying to catch her breath.
“Uh-oh. Are you dead?” Aaron peered down at her, looking scared. He dropped his broom and bolted up the basement stairs and out to the school yard.
She hated Aaron Yoder. He was the meanest person on this earth. She would never speak to him again. Never.
Teacher Rhoda came down to the basement and saw Lily, splayed out on the floor. “What happened?” she asked as she helped Lily to her feet. The back of Lily’s dress was soaking wet.
In a teary, angry voice, Lily told Teacher Rhoda that Aaron had made her fall on purpose.
Aaron was peeping in at them through the window. When he saw that they noticed him, he ran away. Teacher Rhoda went to the door and opened it. “Aaron! Come in here.” She turned to Lily. “You can go upstairs.”
As Lily went upstairs, she hoped Teacher Rhoda would let Aaron have it. She hoped his parents would be called in and told that their son couldn’t be in school anymore. He would be expelled. He deserved it!
Soon—too soon—Teacher Rhoda came up the stairs. She went to Lily and said in a low voice, “Go down to the basement. Aaron has something he wants to say to you.”
No! Lily didn’t want to hear anything from Aaron. She only wanted him to get in trouble. But it wouldn’t be right to say such a thing to Teacher Rhoda. She walked back down to the basement—but slowly. Aaron sat next to the sandbox, scooping sand in his hand and letting it go. When he saw Lily, he rose to his feet. “I’m sorry I made you fall over.” Then a tight look came over his face as he choked out the words, “And I’ll try to be nicer to you from now on.”
Lily wasn’t sure how to respond. She didn’t want to say that she forgave him because that would be a lie. She would never forgive the worst person on earth. She whispered a quiet and hostile “Fine!” and hurried back up the stairs to safety.
It was a good thing that her thoughts could stay private. What she was really thinking was, I’ll believe that when I see it, you awful, horrible boy.
31
A Hurt Toe and an Escape from School
It was warm, too warm to be wearing shoes. Lily wiggled her toes inside her shoes as she sat in the shade under a big maple tree with the rest of the girls one Sunday afternoon after church.
Turning ten meant grown-up dresses, and it also meant wearing shoes to church. Every time—even if it was a warm spring day. Lily had become accustomed to wearing the dresses and the snug apron belt no longer bothered her, but she didn’t think she would ever get used to wearing shoes when the weather was warm.
She watched some of the little girls who ran around in their bare feet. She felt like telling them to run and jump and hop and enjoy being at church with bare feet before they turned ten and had to wear clunky, hot shoes, too.
Beth and Cousin Hannah were braiding a daisy chain. Effie was chattering away about everything she would do when she grew older. “I’m going to make Aaron Yoder come calling on me.”
Lily was horrified. First, Cousin Hannah had an un-understandable crush on Aaron Yoder. Now Effie? Why did the girls think Aaron Yoder was so special? He wasn’t!
Hannah did not like to hear Effie’s plans for Aaron. “You can’t make a boy come calling,” Hannah said. “Boys decide who they want to go calling on. Girls don’t ask boys.”
“Oh, but I promised to marry Aaron when I was in first grade,” Effie said. She smiled at Hannah, but her eyes weren’t smiling.
Lily sighed. This conversation was ridiculous. Just ridiculous. The little girls ran past them again. They seemed so lighthearted and happy as their bare feet skimmed along the neatly mowed grass.
Lily made up her mind. She was going to help the little girls play tag. Anything was better than sitting under this tree listening to Effie’s big plans for Aaron Yoder.
Quietly, she bent down, untied her shoes, and slipped them off. She rolled down her stockings and tucked them into the toes of her shoes to make sure she wouldn’t lose them. Effie was watching. Her eyebrows shot up as Lily stood.
“You can’t go barefoot in church now that you wear a cape and apron,” Effie said.
Lily wiggled her toes in the grass. It felt so good! “But Effie,” she said in her sugary-sweet voice, “church is over already.”
Surprisingly, Effie didn’t have a snappy retort. Lily ran to join the other little girls in their game. She was happy to leave her friends under the tree with their tiresome talk about boys. About Aaron.
The little girls were delighted to have a big girl join them. Soon, Lily was tagged it. She ran along a fence after Lavina, a little eight-year-old who was one of her favorites. Just as Lily reached out to touch Lavina, her big toe caught on a piece of wire and she fell flat on her face.
She sat up and tried to catch her breath. She looked down at her toe and s
queezed her eyes shut. Her big toenail had been torn almost completely off and was now dangling by only one little corner. It hurt so much that she wanted to cry. She couldn’t cry, though, not in front of the little girls. She hobbled gingerly back to the tree, picked her shoes up, and headed for the house to show Mama what had happened.
Mama took one look at it and had Lily sit down in a chair. Someone brought a Band-Aid. Mama reached down to Lily’s toe and gave a quick jerk to remove the nail. She carefully washed her toe and bandaged it.
Lily sat beside Mama for the rest of the afternoon. Her toe throbbed painfully. It felt like it was on fire.
Listening to the women talk was even more painful. She heard Ida Kauffman whisper loudly to Alice, Beth’s mother, “Lily Lapp is such a tomboy. If she were my daughter, I would turn her into a proper little girl in a hurry.”
Lily cringed at the thought of being Ida’s little girl. Imagine if she ended up just like Effie! Two Effies! Lily shuddered.
On Monday morning, Joseph stood at the blackboard, trying to figure out a long division problem. Teacher Rhoda patiently explained the process one more time, but Lily could see that Joseph didn’t understand. He hated math and he especially hated long division.
At breakfast, Joseph had pretended to have a stomachache and said he didn’t want to go to school. Mama said she was pretty sure his stomachache would disappear after math period. Lily never liked long division, either, but it seemed to be harder for Joseph to catch on to it than it was for her.
Teacher Rhoda tried again with Joseph, going over a few more problems slowly and carefully. She sent Joseph to his desk to complete the rest of the assignment on his own. He walked slowly to his desk, head hung low, and opened his books. Lily watched as he worked. His tongue escaped the side of his mouth as he labored. Soon, her attention turned back to the book she was reading.
Lily barely noticed that Teacher Rhoda gave Joseph permission to go to the bathroom. She turned around in her desk just in time to see her brother pause at the back of the schoolhouse. He grabbed his lunch box off the shelf and his straw hat off the hook. Then he bolted out the door.
A Big Year for Lily Page 14