by Diane Munier
So I tell him to sit on my chair and I sit on the top porch step cause I can still be dry with the overhang and I say, “Want me to read you some?” and he says to go ahead.
So the whole time I’m reading he’s just watching me and Granma is reading her magazine rolled up so we can’t see the cover.
I wish my braids weren’t pinned up so I could hold one, but I’m holding Little Bit anyway until she goes to Easy and he ends up holding her and scratching her all over. She loves him so much and stretches out and gets her real dopey eyes like when Granma has had too much out of the glass and sings about Kansas City. Little Bit is just happy.
But Easy likes Nancy Drew. I finish chapter one and I look at him and raise my brows and he nods like I should go on.
Me and Abigail May love when Ned Nickerson shows up. That’s Nancy’s boyfriend. I think it’s probably really great to have a boyfriend like Ned and someday maybe I’ll have one, that’s what I always think, but it could be Easy cause that’s what happens with Moondoggie, Gidget doesn’t know he’ll love her like he does in the end and she’s so, so happy, but with Ned he helps Nancy solve mysteries and me and Easy already did that, solved two, about the confessional where Father sits and also the top floor of my school. I don’t think it’s haunted at all. I don’t think Abigail May saw Sister Mary Sponza. It was probably just a pigeon. Or a penguin. That makes me smile.
Well the rain lets up and Easy says he best go, and Granma is sound asleep and I say we should change out that bandage so he follows me back inside and he sits in the kitchen and I go in the bathroom and get the supplies and he says he can do it. He peels off the bandage and it is gooey and red and I put the Bactine on his scrape and he hisses like a flat tire.
“I’m sorry Easy,” I say because it takes all my courage to be a nurse like this.
And he does the strangest thing, he touches the braids pinned on top of my head.
I just hold still and stare at him. He’s looking at my hair, not my eyes so it’s not even hard to keep looking at him.
Then he does look at me. He pulls back the hand that’s not holding Little Bit but touching my hair so lightly.
I just smile at him cause he looks so serious and life is just a bowl of cherries, Granma says, but I never know what that means.
He takes over then and I hold Little Bit while he wraps his leg with a new bandage.
“Easy?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s…how’s your Mom?”
He looks at me then. He finishes pinning that bandage and he’s looking at the wounds on his arm and hand. “She’s all right,” he says.
“Well what’s the matter with her?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “She don’t go to the doctor.”
“Does she want to? Cause my Granma….”
“Georgia…just leave her alone, okay? If you get your Granma coming over and even Miss May, then I can’t be your friend.”
Well that about hurts my feelings so badly I lift enough to sit on my heels just to get away from him.
“I…don’t want to be mean like that. But she don’t want to be bothered and I…take care of her, so you won’t leave me a choice.” This is the most he’s said about almost anything.
“So I can’t even meet her or you won’t even be my friend?” I say, knowing he won’t want to say all that again and I don’t want him to. But I’d like to meet her at least.
He fiddles with his bandage and looks at me.
“Maybe I could ask my Granma to send her a plate….”
“No.” He shakes his head a little. “She won’t eat it.”
“Then you could.”
“No.”
“I want to help you.”
“Why? I don’t need that.”
“What does she eat then? She don’t like meatloaf or something?”
“She don’t eat much. Just a couple things. We’re fine.”
“Well…what about Cap? He ever coming home or….” Or is he like Abigail May, just gone into a tunnel of nothing never to return again.
“He’ll come back for school probably. I don’t know.”
“He with your relatives?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re from there? Shoehorn?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the funniest name ever.”
“Yeah,” he says and he looks away and pokes his tongue into his cheek and makes a bump like he’s sucking on a jawbreaker or a gumball.
“You ever eat Sputnik gum?”
“What?” he laughs a little.
“Sputnik gum! Don’t you remember it? A big blue ball of gum that looked like Sputnik.”
“No,” he laughs.
“Well you missed out then. They don’t sell it anymore. Abigail May wouldn’t eat it cause she said each piece had a little dog inside.”
“Why’d she say that?” he laughs.
“Sputnik Two had a dog inside. We don’t know if he lived. The Russians are so mean. I’ll bet that dog was so, so lonely. If they come over here I’m hiding Little Bit. I’ll never let her go into space.”
He smiles at me but he shakes his head. “The Russians ain’t ever getting into America,” he says.
“What about Castro?” I say. We had all those days during the beginning of last school year when our teachers listened to the radio and we waited to see if Castro was going to bomb America. I was never so scared in my life, but President Kennedy didn’t let it happen and Granma said that he was a gift from God.
“United States whips everybody,” he says. “We never lose a war.”
“Well I know we’re the strongest in the whole world. I’m so happy to be an American. I wouldn’t want to be from any other country ever.” I’m just so happy that he seems so sure.
“Me neither. Soon as I can I’m going to join the army.”
“Like John Wayne?” I say.
“Pretty much.”
I whistle. “You’ll have to do what they say,” I tell him.
“I will. They don’t scare me.”
Wow. I am speechless. I can just see Easy in that uniform with ropes braided on his shoulders and that hat.
He’s already brave, I know that. I have to think a whole new way now. Moondoggie is nothing like a soldier. I don’t even think Moondoggie ever held a gun.
But Steve McQueen has. All I can think of is The Magnificent Seven. Easy would make the magnificent eight. I know that’s cowboys, but he’s that brave.
“You want to see our bomb shelter?” I ask him.
He does want to see that. So we go out the backdoor and he follows me around to the cellar and I feel a little strange showing him something Abigail May and I have always guarded so carefully. But Easy won’t tell. So I ask him to lift the cellar door cause that’s always the hardest part, and he lifts it and I lead us down the stairs and into the cellar. I tell him to close the door and it’s dark at first before I find the cord and pull the light. It’s not bright, but you can see everything. All of Granma’s jars on the shelves because she doesn’t can anymore, she says that why God created Moe’s.
“Those are our supplies,” I say pointing at the blankets where me and Abigail May, well now just me sit, and our box with the flashlights and the food.
He is smiling and he looks at me. “This is a cellar.”
“Yeah but Abigail May thinks we could make it in here cause it’s solid and at least it’s underground.”
He keeps looking at me.
“Well you could come too, if anything happens.”
He keeps looking.
“Georgia,” he says, then nothing else.
“I know you said they can’t get here.”
“You won’t ever need a bomb shelter,” he says. “No one is going to hurt America. Not ever. If Russians came I would keep you safe.”
“You…would?”
“Yeah.”
“What about Granma?”
“Americans will fight. We’ll always fight and we’ll
win,” he says. “I do it now. I’m not taking anything anymore.”
It takes me a minute. I hear what he’s saying. “You’re not?”
“No.”
We’re looking at each other. “I didn’t know…did your dad hurt you sometimes?”
He looks behind him at the door, then back at me. “It doesn’t matter now,” he says. “You can’t tell. Don’t say that to your Granma.”
“I told you…I wouldn’t.”
“If you have to….”
“I won’t.”
He thinks he has to go then and I hear the Mr. Softie truck but I don’t even care.
“He hurt you?”
“You can’t tell.”
“I wouldn’t. Those marks on you…?”
He bows his head and he’s pinching top of his nose and I can’t see his eyes. But I walk over to him and I pat his arm. “Easy,” I say.
He looks at me, and he’s so sad in his eyes. He can’t even cry.
I take his hand then. “I’ll always be your friend, Easy.”
He puts his arms around me then and I’m holding Little Bit, and I have one arm around Easy and I pat his back. I already know I love him. I hope he knows it too.
Darnay Road 35
I finally get a letter from Abigail May. She got my fat letter and wrote me this one. She starts out saying she does write all the time like she said but she just doesn’t mail one every day. Mr. Figley says writing everyday takes too many five cent stamps and money doesn’t grow on trees.
Well hogwash on that. Old Prunley is Mr. Scrooge.
Anyway, Abigail asked Ricky if he wanted to do The Parent Trap backwards. In that movie, one of the best ever, Hayley Mills plays twins and the twins join forces to get their divorced parents back together. Maybe I love, love that movie because I am the only other kid I’ve ever known who had parents that divorced. My mother and dad divorced when I was a baby even though Catholics are to never ever divorce. And Dad brought me to Granma the way the stork brings babies to parents all over this land. I was nearly two years old and Granma said that stork never worked so hard. By the time he got to Missouri he was exhausted.
I know she doesn’t mean Stanley. Or maybe she does. I love that part about the stork though.
Granma says she asked that stork, “Why is this kid so old? I wanted a nice fresh baby. A boy. What the heck am I going to do with a little girl?”
And the stork said, “Lady, just take this kid and don’t ask questions.”
So she did.
Sometimes I need to hear that story. I lay my head on her lap and she runs her hand over my hair and she says that part about the stork and her not knowing what to do with a little girl and it makes me laugh because she knows everything there is to do with a little girl—with me. And if she doesn’t know, well I help her.
“Is that why you always get the headache?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “Bottles and bottles of Bufferin to raise this small girl.”
It makes me so happy when she says that. See I’m not really a headache all the time just some of the time. She’s just saying that because I’m not giving her a headache. See?
“Tell me about Renee,” I ask, and Granma says how my mother appeared in lady’s magazines.
I have a picture but it’s like a drawing of a woman with short dark hair who looks like Elizabeth Taylor, only so elegant she’s like black-haired Barbie in one of her gowns. She’s so beautiful I try to imagine I grew in her tummy, but I can’t imagine that I ever knew her.
She’s just a drawing.
I asked Granma if my mother ever wanted me and Granma says Renee, that’s her name, was young and frivolous and she couldn’t take care of a baby and be a famous model. She had to go to Europe to work and so Dad divorced her. Then she got sick there and died.
It used to make me very sad, but now I’m just sad sometimes. I only remember one thing and it’s a shadowy living room in what I now know was Chicago and I’m sitting on the couch and I won’t go to bed and Renee is standing in the dark in a beautiful flowing white nightgown telling me I can sit in the dark if I want to but her and Stanley are going to bed. I guess I’m on my high horse even though I’m very small.
But she isn’t angry, she’s just going along. That is all I remember.
Abigail May lost her dad in that war with North Korea. I’m not happy about it, but Ricky knew him just a little, and Abigail May never knew him at all so we both have a parent gone for good and it helped…to have Abigail May. Sometimes Abigail May would try to get us to be sad together, but whenever Abigail tried to get us sad I ended up laughing. I know it’s very terrible, but Abigail is so funny when she’s trying to get me sad. She talks in this low voice, really slow, and she doesn’t even know what she’s saying half the time. I just laugh.
Anyway when Gloria Sue went to Florida for good we shared that too, both our parents leaving us to go to work in a faraway city. Only Abigail May stayed with her aunt and I stayed with Granma, of course.
Abigail May wants Ricky to help her get Gloria Sue and Mr. Prunley also known as Mr. Figley apart so she can come back to the real home she loves. She said she is very very homesick and her mother has no time for her as she always works or goes to the country club to play cards with Prunley or to go dancing or to play bingo.
Ricky told Abigail May to suck an egg. He doesn’t like living in an apartment and he hates Figley and Figley can’t tell him what to do, but he loves the beach and he’s learning how to surf so he stays out all day and Abigail is alone at the apartment.
Well that is just terrible. Ricky says Abigail May needs to keep her pointy little nose out of Gloria Sue’s troubles.
Abigail May says Prunley says Gloria Sue doesn’t need to spend so much money on her and Ricky. He says Ricky, who just turned twelve like Easy, is plenty old enough to earn some of his keep.
Ricky mowed lawns here but that was just for extra money. I heard Aunt May tell my Granma that Mr. Prunley is going to realize it was way cheaper to just send money to Aunt May and let her do the rest. She said he’s in for a rude awakening. I never know what that means exactly except for a big lesson. But the rude part, I’m not sure.
Anyway Prunley wants Ricky to be a box-boy at the grocery but Ricky says he ain’t doing it, or anything that old fart wants.
I don’t know what costs so much when it comes to raising a kid. We can’t drive or anything. My dad always sends money to Granma for me. I wonder if he wants to send that money. I mean, maybe he wishes I’d never been born or something. That would be terrible. For me. Maybe for Granma but if she didn’t know me she wouldn’t be sad. Man my head could explode with all these ideas sometimes.
Anyway, Abigail May does not want to go to school in Tampa. Prunley says they have to go to public cause Catholic is too expensive and too far away and there’s no bus. So Abigail May has been crying everyday about going to public cause they don’t give as good an education and no religion class and the publickers know one another and she won’t know anyone.
Well I think of how nice Easy is and he’s a heathen and a publicker, but still he’s the best boy ever. I’ll have to write that to Abigail May but I pretty much already did. I just wish I was around to help her make war on Prunley like the twins in The Parent Trap. I would be Annie to Abigail’s Hayley. But I can’t help her now I don’t think.
Can I?
I finish reading Easy The Secret of the Old Clock. He says he likes it, but he’s laughing too.
I say, “Easy what is so funny?”
And he says, “Nothing. You just…you’re a good reader.”
Well I feel about so, so proud.
Later Granma says, “I believe that boy would sit just as rapt if you read him the phonebook.”
“You mean he’s faking?” I say cause he does listen very well.
“Oh no. He’s not faking,” she says.
Granma and her ideas. Sometimes she doesn’t make sense to anyone but herself.
But G
ranma does walk me down to Miss Little’s with a plate of cookies the next day. She says she doesn’t want to get it started, and I say what and she says Miss Little coming to our house and being crazy.
Easy told us over supper, another supper which was fried chicken, what we have every Thursday, and my Granma makes the best, also mashed potatoes and gravy, but Easy told how Miss Little behaved when he finished her yard. He says she came outside holding a kitten, one of mine though we do not say it in front of Granma cause she said the whole subject gives her the headache. Easy said Miss Little walked all over the yard just talking to herself. She thinks her husband cleared it out, he says, and now she’s worried the bad people can see her.
So I say to my Granma, “Did you ever see Miss Little be regular? Like before her husband got killed in the war?”
And Granma says Miss Little was never anything but peculiar but everyone just loved John and he seemed to help Miss Little look more normal.
Easy says Miss Little has something broken inside, in her brain maybe. But I think it’s her heart and when I tell Easy he says wherever it is, it’s not her fault.
So I get to thinking about it, how Easy has worked so hard for Miss Little and what a great American he is trying to be. Granma tells me not to get on one of my campaigns. But I don’t think I ever get on a campaign. I’m not running for president, I’m just a kid.
“Granma just think about it. If Darnay Road was a farm like in The Little House on the Prairie Books, we’d all be on the same farm!” I say. I mean, you think of all the houses around here on the same one hundred and sixty acres and you get what I’m saying.
“The funny farm maybe,” Granma says. “Here we are close enough we have to give one another some space. I say Miss Little has a right to be anyway she wants long as she’s not hurting anyone. You learn this when you are older. You learn to look the other way and let others be.”
That doesn’t sound exactly right. “We are supposed to help our neighbors. What good is religion class if I’m not supposed to do any of it on my free time? And you read me President Kennedy’s address how many times? We are to work to abolish poverty. Granma, what can we do?”