Paradise, Piece by Piece

by Molly Peacock

  It was up to me now to keep us alive in the house, since Ted would probably try to kill us. Why else would Polly say, “Always put the knives away! Never, never use a knife and leave it on the counter. You can never tell about your father.” Why did she roll her eyes toward Gail and say to me knowingly, “I told him I’d call the police if he ever harms a hair on her head.” On the table lay her note with what to cook for dinner. If we wrapped ourselves in the apron of her instructions, would we smell like her? I was rank with fear and responsibility—the child-mother smell.

  Plunk went a Melmac bowl. Thud went a painted glass. Grandma Ruth stationed me at the foot of the big, marred walnut table at La Grange, then grabbed the bowl, went out to the fence, and picked the blackberries right into it. After she gave me the berries, she swiped the glass and cruised to the kitchen, lifted an enamel ladle from a white pail, and sloshed water into it. All the time I sat and watched her. I didn’t have to do a thing. After she put the water in front of me, she sat down to watch me eat. I picked up each berry, the size of my fingernail, before I ate it. Sour! My grandmother dumped a spoonful of sugar on the berries. The timer chimed. She glided out to the kitchen where the heavy oven door squawked and the cookie trays clattered. Armed with a spatula, she shoveled molasses cookies, four inches wide and cratered as moons, onto sugared plates to cool. While she bedded them down in a tin between wax paper sheets, I got my gold-zippered white Bible with my name on it ready.

  Time for Number 2. I slid from my chair and went to my room off the living room. Between the iron bed and the dresser was a white enamel chamber pot where I squatted and did my Number 2, holding Wild Rose perfume to my nose to help with the stink. Toilet paper was on the low shelf of the dresser. Then I clamped the lid. “Number two, Gram,” I called on my way to the door.

  “Don’t forget the cookies!” she called back. “And watch for foxes!”

  July buzzed with rabies warnings. I carried the tin of cookies and Bible in front of me ceremonially as I walked toward the white-spired church. It was 8:55 A.M. and the house at La Grange hummed behind me, all in place. I waved to my grandfather as I passed the gas pumps. He was in his ESSO uniform. I moved quickly past the orchard with the garden beds, looking for rabid foxes. Then past a house, past a barn, to the church. It was the second day of Bible School, and I already knew the routine. Hating the idea of camp, I was allowed to go home to La Grange. Gail was too allergic to come. She had hay fever and asthma, as did my aunt and grandmother. (“Not me!” Polly had crowed. “I’m strong as a Clydesdale!”)

  I used the back door to the La Grange Baptist Church, scuttling through the hall hung with choir robes and hurrying into the church itself, and down the side aisle to the hidden staircase. Our class was up in the balcony. There was Margaret, our teacher. She was a second cousin of mine—I was related to everybody in La Grange.

  “Oh, you brought your grandma’s cookies!” she cooed. “Thank you for taking your turn so early!” Everybody was polite in La Grange. Nobody took the name of the Lord in vain, let alone said shit or piss or friggin’. Each exchange was as fresh as the turn of a page.

  Frannie popped in and then Judy, her half sister with the big boobs. My shy, dark second cousin Constance came, too. Cool Jack Stewart sauntered up, hands in pockets. And his half sister Bonnie Strathem weasled into the pew just before the Boyle boy with his sunburnt face and square freckled hands. Bonnie had been in a fire and the skin on half her face and neck and one whole arm was brittle as pork rind.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I don’t feel nothing at all,” she said.

  Her brother kept a long spear of grass in his mouth, almost like a cigarette. Five girls and two boys in our class. A boy like Jack Stewart wouldn’t have sat by me at Benjamin Franklin Junior High School, but here I was cool. I was related to everybody! Plus I wore my turquoise shorts.

  “Let us pray,” said Margaret. She stumbled through a made-up prayer about Bible School and ended, “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.” Then she said, “Let us sing,” and we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” really loud. At Ben Franklin I was only a second soprano in chorus, but here I let loose and sang the melody. We all sang the melody, and Margaret sang the harmony.

  “Is there anyone here who hasn’t asked Jesus Christ to be their own personal savior?” she asked when we finished. “Remember, you must ask Him if you want to be saved and go to heaven.”

  Really? I had not asked. We were all silent. None of us raised a hand.

  “Now,” said Margaret, “maybe you asked when you were little boys and girls, but now you’re getting grown up. Jack, you’re fourteen going on fifteen. Judy, you’re sixteen years old. How old are you, Molly?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Then you’re all old enough to ask again. Call Jesus into your hearts.”

  None of us spoke.

  “Jack and Bonnie and Red Boyle, this means you, too.”

  No one spoke.

  “Before your noon meal, after we get done here and you play softball, I want you to kneel by your beds and ask Jesus Christ to be your own personal savior today.” Margaret’s voice quickened to our emergency. “There’s not a minute to lose!” She thumped her hand on the balcony railing and her pincurls flapped. Then, coolly, she whispered, “Onto our projects, now.” The God part was over and we hauled out our sandpaper and plywood squares and little baby nails and tin crosses and shellac, clambering over the pews. We were going to make Christian recipe boxes for our mothers, and it would take us all three weeks. The wood was pre-sawn, but we had to do the rest.

  After the noon meal at La Grange the ladies with their crochet and embroidery flooded the dining room table with floss and gossip about my mother who tipped over outhouses, chopped off her hair, rode bareback, drove her own car, and grabbed a rich, deaf boyfriend who gave her a muskrat coat, then dumped him for my father. (Oh! I could have had a rich, deaf father instead of Ted!) Perching with the ladies, I learned how to do French knots, got bored, and flopped into my room to read. Squatting on the chamber pot to pee, then putting toilet paper on the urine and dumping in a few drops of Wild Rose to expunge the sharpness, then clamping the tin cover on, I thought of what Margaret said and pictured Jesus at the Last Supper. Shouldn’t it have been the Last Dinner? There He was with all His boyfriends drinking and eating. If you didn’t have Christ as your own personal savior, Margaret rasped at us, you’d go straight to hell. We wanted to go to heaven, didn’t we?

  When I knelt by the bed my legs stuck out so far I almost tipped over the pee. I got up and moved the pot. Down on my knees, the floor was hard. I moved the rag rug nearer the bed, and knelt down again. Should I close my eyes? No, I should clasp my hands and look up at the ceiling, raw board with nails in it—Grandpa had never finished the ceiling.

  Dear Jesus, I prayed, I’m asking you to come into my heart to be my own personal savior. Amen.

  Maybe I should have closed my eyes.

  Dear Jesus Christ, I prayed beneath my lids, please come into my heart to he my own personal savior. Amen.

  My heart, did it beat the same way? Yes, it did. I clamped my hands over my ears to feel the blood rushing through me. Was something there? I had said please and used both His first and last names. Nothing was happening! I bowed my head against the quilt. You don’t feel changed right away, Margaret said, but some people did. Like they got struck by lightning. I must be having the gradual change. Getting up on my two feet made me sleepy. I plopped on the bed and really did sleep, waking in the afternoon heat, my cheek against a bump in the quilt. Was I changed? I lay there, feeling nothing new.

  Time to walk across the road for Grandma. I traipsed to Mrs. Calofska’s back door, played with some kittens there, and put a nickel in a basket before I removed a glass bottle of milk with a tin foil cover. I dragged the bottle home. I was famous because my grandmother put an announcement that I was attending Bible School in the La Grange Herald. Mrs. Calofska put a notice in that her nephew
Oliver would come to visit his aunt that evening. Even my Grandpa Gillie, who never went anywhere, crossed the road after supper with Ruth and me to say hello to Oliver. Oliver was blond and my age and held two glass jars with lids, “For when it gets dark enough,” he said.

  We went into the farmhouse and looked at Ripley’s Believe It Or Nots until it was dark enough. Then we crept through the night air. “Molly,” Ruth called, “go home and get your sweater!” I shoved my jar at Oliver and ran across the road to plunge my arms into my grandmother’s sweater, smelling of Avon’s Lily of the Valley, and ran back and grabbed the jar. “What are we doing?” I asked him breathlessly. “Fireflies,” he said. Out in the dark meadow the fireflies flickered on and off. In we went, the grasses biting my bare legs. “Like this!” Oliver caught one. I tried and couldn’t do it. The fly’s light went off just when I thought I could nab it.

  “I can’t!”

  “Sure you can. Watch again!” He was taller than I and lanky, like Jack Stewart. He was here for the week but refused to sign up for Bible School. I tried again and couldn’t do it. It was like asking Jesus Christ to be my own personal savior. “They go off at a slant when the light goes out, so snap it up to the side and get the lid on and hold it tight.” I tried again. My jar lit up with two of them! “Hey, you got two!” Oliver whispered. Then we tried again and got more. Our jars were lighting up like store windows.

  “Molly!” Ruth called, and I pretended not to hear her.

  “Your grandmother’s calling you,” Oliver said dutifully, and I said, “Oh,” and ran back to her with my jar. Oliver came after.

  “How do we feed them?” I said.

  “What for?” Oliver asked.

  “Well, we don’t want them to die!”

  “They ain’t gonna die, we’re gonna let em out!”

  Oh, we’re going to let go of them, I thought with disappointment, the same letdown I felt when Aunt Roberta once said we had to put back the little perch we caught on our lines, followed by the same feeling of freedom from my trophy. I wouldn’t be responsible for killing the fish, or now, for having to keep the bugs alive. Everything was on its own, including me, buzzing in the universe.

  Each day of the week was a tad different: laundry day, watering the gardens day, Frannie and Judy come pick me up for the lake day. In the mornings Ruth wrote in her diary and I went to the church; in the afternoons Ruth sewed and I read; some evenings Oliver and I caught fireflies and played with the kittens. On others Ruth looked up with her moist eyes and said, “Are you bored?” She looked as sweet as a Swiss cow. “You are bored,” she concluded, “so why don’t you write me a poem?” Then I obliged her with haikus. I’d learned how to write them in seventh grade Language Arts and dillydallied over the three lines of five, seven, and five syllables—a lot better than rhyming my shamrock poem. I knew you had to write hundreds just to get one good one—like capturing a firefly out of the field.

  The flow of the days was light and even, like the skies of heaven in the Bible books. Jesus Christ had not come into my heart, though I asked Him every dinner hour, and on Friday, I gave up. This is like Santa Claus for older people, I thought, picturing Buffalo and the smokestacks and Peacock’s Superette with Polly hidden inside it and Gail scrunched over her Barbie and Ted sacked out on the couch with the TV on. I was the visitor from another planet, the city, and like extraterrestrials I knew more than the humans at La Grange did: I knew they had heaven, right here, all to their own.

  As if somebody stowed six slabs of bacon in a lingerie drawer, the six bottles of beer in Grandma’s refrigerator assaulted me when I opened the door. What were they doing there? I’d meandered in from the orchard where I’d spent the early afternoon looking up into the branches of an old, old tree with my notebook and my pen. I was writing a story about a girl looking up into the branches of an old, old tree. Maybe the brown bottles were some kind of birch beer….No, they were Carling’s Black Label. Voices in the garage. Quick to the spy hole.

  The spy hole was a round piece of telescope glass that Grandpa Gillie embedded in the wall by the telephone that was so old it didn’t have a dial. You had to get the operator to place a call. If you climbed on a wooden stool and looked through the glass, you could sweep the whole store, all the red shelves of candy and the blue pop machine and the newspapers and the bags of flour and sugar and the cans of motor oil on white shelves. There was such a crowd out there! My mother and my father, Aunt Roberta, and Stanley and Lucie Calofska from across the road, and my cousin Howie, and the minister! He left immediately, though. He was just paying for gas. The others stayed. Something grabbed the hem of my shorts. It was my sister. “Hey, Mol.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We came today instead of tomorrow. Daddy wanted to. Mommy got Flo to take the store.”

  “Daddy put beer in Grandma’s refrigerator!”

  “He put a lot more in his stomach than in the fridge,” my sister said.

  “Is he drunk?”

  Gail giggled. In her white sleeveless blouse she looked cool and soft, like a stuffed animal you’d want to buy and know it would be your favorite. “Drunk as a skunk!” she said.

  My silent cousin Howie came in to meander around the dining room table and look us up and down. He was Gail’s age and wore overalls with a bib and hardly ever talked. He was in the pipsqueak class at Bible School. “Any cookies?” he finally said, round-eyed. The three of us raced to the kitchen to the glass cookie jar with its tin lid. Molasses and peanut butter in fistfuls.

  —

  “What do you mean, we’re going now? Aren’t we going to stay for supper?” I asked my mother in the bedroom.

  “We’re not staying. We just came to get you.”

  “But you weren’t supposed to come till tomorrow!”

  “Well, your father wanted to come today.” Polly rolled her eyes.

  “But, Ma, I’m not packed!”

  “Just throw your clothes in the suitcase, Mols. We’ll wash ’em when we get home.”

  “You mean I’ll wash ’em,” I spat at her. “Why can’t you sell the store? Why can’t you just be home?”

  “Don’t start that, Molly.”

  “But I can’t go! I haven’t said good-bye to any of my friends!”

  “Call ’em on the phone, Mols.”

  “Jack doesn’t have a phone!”

  “Is Jack a boy?”

  “Yes!” I screamed. “But he’s not my boyfriend!”

  “Just pack, Molly. Fast. Gail’s waiting in the car.”

  My grandmother came into the bedroom with two lines across her forehead. She was wearing her green flowered dress and her stockings and her brown shoes. She was dressed to meet the world as she always was, dressed for Saturday, when so many visitors came because they stopped for gas. “Oh, Pauline,” she said to my mother in a quavery voice, “I had everything all ready for tomorrow! I’ve got a nice chicken to roast, and gravy, and mashed potatoes, and nice peas. I baked fruit pies. Oh well, I’ll pack up the pies for you. I wish you’d have called, Pauline. I could have popped that chicken right in the roaster.” It wasn’t a chicken you buy at the store. It had its neck broken by Mrs. Calofska who swung it around her head like a boomerang. Then Ruth plucked the feathers out of it and threw the head to Mrs. Calofska’s cat.

  “Here’s your suitcase, Molly,” my grandmother said. She opened the green bag on the bed.

  “Just throw your clothes in, Mol,” my mother said softly. Polly looked as if she had just thrown her clothes on, dressed in stretch pants and a floppy jersey.

  “Oh, Mom,” I said, my wail surprising me.

  “Whass everybody doin’ in here!” Ted burst in.

  Polly took him by the arm. “We’re just getting Molly packed,” she said.

  “Well, son, you took us by surprise!” my grandmother said.

  “It was time for a trip!” Ted crowed, backing out of the bedroom. He held one of the Carling’s Black Labels crooked in his arm. He was wear
ing Bermuda shorts. No man in the country wore them. They all wore overalls, or long pants with shirts for church.

  Skinny Aunt Roberta peered round the door. She bobbed her permed brunette frizz excitedly up and down saying, “Here’s your birthday present!”

  “But my birthday’s over with,” I said sullenly.

  “Birthdays go on all year!” She handed me a striped box with a white ribbon. The box matched the lime stripes on her cotton sundress, all the pleats on the bodice sewn into neat lines.

  “Can I open it?”

  “Sure you can,” both Polly and my grandmother said simultaneously.

  I tore at it hard. It was taped up with so much Scotch tape it seemed bandaged. When I got the box open, there was even tape on the tissue paper. Inside the tissue was a blouse, white, with blue embroidery. My aunt had bought the blouse and my grandmother had embroidered it with blue daisies, blue stems, blue leaves down the front placket. It was really a corny blouse, but so starched, so white, the satiny stitches shone like keys to a secret. It would glow in my closet on Pilgrim Road, where we were going, going in minutes.

  My voice caught when I thanked them, and we sailed right on into leaving.

  “Here are Frannie and Judy and Jack’s addresses,” my grandmother said, “and here’s your Christian Recipe Box.”

  “You can write them when you get home,” my Aunt Roberta said.

  “But that box was for you, Grandma!”

  “Oh I know you love the box you made, I put a cookie recipe in it for you. You use the box at home and make some cookies.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. I really did want the box I’d spent three weeks sanding and varnishing.

  “Now wash your hands,” my grandmother said. “I’ll finish packing for you.” I hadn’t really even started.

  The kitchen was cool and empty. Out the window were pink hollyhocks, and beyond them, the vegetable garden. I dipped the metal dipper in the enamel pail of water Ruth had pumped. I poured the water in a white enamel basin. I splashed my hands and soaped them and splashed again and wiped them on a long striped towel. There was water all over the floor.