Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  “She did a top-notch job,” George put in. “It wouldn’t be right to have girls and boys mix, now would it, Debbie?”

  “We have to sit mixed at school,” Bobby said. “They won’t let the boys sit together in class, like we want to. The teacher splits us up.”

  “I’d wager that’s because you boys get rowdy,” Lydie said, “and the girls calm you down.”

  Debbie was still caught up in the idea that she’d had a hand in the seating arrangements at the dinner table. “I have my mom on one side,” she said importantly, “and I have your mom”—she pointed her fork across the table at Gene and Bobby—“on the other. And there’s only one dad.”

  It was always something like this that did it. Everything normal, and then suddenly there would come a slap and it came from someone who least meant to give it—who was surprised, even, by the words that came out of her mouth. During the silence that followed this observation, Debbie stared down at her plate, and I could sense the possibility of tears.

  “You know what, dear?” Lydie said, touching a hand to Debbie’s back and leaning down to see her face. “There’s actually two dads here, because your dad is here in all of our hearts. Isn’t that right?” she said, glancing over Debbie’s head at me.

  “Sure it is,” I replied mechanically.

  “That’s right,” she repeated, and when Debbie raised her face, Lydie took the opportunity to turn the attention away from her by asking Bobby what he’d done in school that day.

  The talk went on. Lydie wasn’t a chatty woman—among strangers she could be downright shy—but she knew how to draw out others when the situation required it. A regular meal might pass in relative silence, but this wasn’t a regular meal. She got her sons to carry the conversation while the rest of us recovered. At some point, I felt George’s foot nudge mine and settle there, touching. I didn’t risk looking at him, but for the rest of the meal I was aware of almost nothing else. His touch—even through layers of sock and hard leather—was a thrilling fact. I’d never before felt such affection for a foot. It was the truest thing in the room, and no one else knew it.

  After the meal was done, while the others retired to the living room to watch television, Lydie and I cleared the table and started on the dishes. The pie had come out of the oven during supper, and it was still cooling on the counter, so we’d agreed to do the cleanup and have dessert after. Lydie was slicing a chunk of cheddar cheese for the pie while the swelling horns from Laramie’s theme song rose up from the other room. The strings followed, and then the boys shushing one another as the song came to an end. They were rarely quiet except while watching television.

  Lydie asked about my job at the cafeteria, what it was like working there. “Are the others mostly married women,” she asked, “or is it younger gals?”

  “Neither one, really. There’s a couple married women, and there’s one other like me. A widow.” I laughed at my use of the term, which was formal-sounding and odd; I almost never referred to myself that way, but I’d been introduced as a widow enough times since I started work that it only seemed fitting to use it now. Lydie raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything in response. “Her husband’s been gone eight years,” I added. The woman I was speaking of was a gal named Rita, whose husband had died fighting over in Korea. She was the only colored person I’d ever been in close contact with before, and I’d been nervous working with her the first few days because she didn’t have a car and I worried that she’d ask me for a ride if we got too friendly. I didn’t ever go into the colored section of town, and I didn’t intend to start now. Rita tended to keep to herself, pretty much, and I’d stopped worrying about getting too close.

  Now I described for Lydie the other women I worked with. Mrs. Brainerd and Betty Ann, who knew everyone’s business and made a point of sharing it (it was from her that I’d heard about Rita’s husband), and the two Marys, and Edith, who was nothing like my sister who shared the same name. The Edith I worked with was thirty-three years old, yet looked twenty-three. She had dimples and beautiful hair the color of a copper penny that she managed to keep styled even beneath the hairnet.

  “Sounds like you found a good place, working there.” Lydie picked up the stack of plates, carried them over to the sink, and began running water for dishes. “And Joe and Debbie? How are they handling it?”

  “They’re doing just fine. I drive them down to my sister’s, and they have breakfast with her and John Charlie and then Rena takes them down to get the bus.”

  “I didn’t even think about the fact that you’d have to leave in the mornings before they do.”

  “I didn’t, either, until I got the job. It’s worked out well enough.” We both stood waiting for the sink to fill. The water was yellowish, though not as dark as the water at our house, which was almost the same shade as weak tea. The well made it that way. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I was to off-color water until I started washing dishes at the cafeteria and saw it come out of the faucet as clear as crystal.

  “Now, listen here, Hazel,” Lydie said. “It doesn’t make any sense for you to drive three or four miles in the opposite direction every morning just to drop them off at your sister’s place. That must mean Joe and Debbie have a longer bus ride, too. Why don’t you stop by and drop them here on your way into town? I can feed them breakfast just as easy as Rena can, and you know Bobby’s on the same bus, so there’s no danger they’ll miss it.”

  It was too much to think of—Lydie taking care of my children five days a week, even if it was only for an hour in the mornings. “We can’t trouble you like that,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want to do it. Look, it’s a whole lot of bother for you to be driving all over the county every morning. I’m already fixing breakfast for George and the boys. It’s not any trouble to make a bit more.”

  “Really, I couldn’t ask you to do all that.”

  “You’re not asking!” Lydie said, and I could tell that she had gotten impatient, even annoyed. “I’m telling you it’s no trouble, Hazel—I’m offering. And to be frank, I wish we’d settle it now so I can stop trying to convince you that it’s not any trouble.” Shaking her head, she plunked a few glasses into the soapy water and began washing them with furious strokes. “My goodness,” she muttered when I still didn’t say anything. “All this fuss over nothing.”

  “Well,” I began in response to Lydie’s grumbling. I’ll think about it, is what I was going to say. But right at that moment, she knocked the glass she was rinsing against the side of the sink and it broke dramatically: one large piece of glass flew up and pinged off the faucet. The remainder of the glass was still in her hand.

  “Damn,” she said fiercely, shaking her head. “Clumsy. I don’t know what’s got into me.” She turned to look at me, a strange smile forming on her lips, and then she gasped. “Why, Hazel, what’s—”

  I flinched as her hand rose to my face. I don’t know what I was thinking she would do—slap me, I suppose. I wasn’t much used to being hit, but my mother had used to smack me when I was a child, and even as a young woman, when I didn’t do what she said, or didn’t do it fast enough, or didn’t do it up to her standards. She was a moody woman, and when she was in one of her moods she was quick to use her hands rather than put into words exactly what was bothering her. It had been years since that time, and my mother was long gone, but my old instincts returned—I flinched, in spite of myself, as Lydie’s hand came up, dripping with dishwater.

  “You’re cut,” she said, patting a finger to a spot just over my left eyebrow. She held it up so I could see: it came away red with blood. “Must be a piece of glass flew up and got you. Now let me see if it’s still in there or what.” And after dipping her finger in the dishwater to wash off the blood, she took my shoulders firmly in her hands and steered me over into the light. “Sit down,” she instructed. She pulled out a chair, and I took a seat. Then she tilted my head down so she could examine the wound. “Bleeding like the dick
ens.”

  She went to the counter to get a clean washcloth, and as she opened the drawer, I heard footsteps in the next room and turned to see George standing in the doorway with my daughter beside him. “Debbie here wanted to know—” He stopped. “What in the world?”

  “I broke a glass,” Lydie explained, closing the drawer she’d been riffling through and coming back over with a yellow dishcloth in hand. She glanced down at Debbie, who had followed George into the room and then, like a shadow, stopped beside him again.

  “I’m all right, Debbie,” I said, holding out one hand, but she didn’t come any nearer. “Just a little cut.” I reached the hand up and wiped away a drip of blood that was making its way down to my eye. “It doesn’t even hurt,” I added, which was true; I couldn’t even feel exactly where the cut was on my forehead.

  Debbie swallowed hard. Then she was crying. “Now, there,” George said. He put a hand on top of her head. “We came in to see about having pie, but looks like you’ve got more important things to take care of. You need a bandage?” He was looking at me, but Lydie answered yes, and he took Debbie out of the room.

  While they were gone, Lydie tilted my head so she could see the cut. She blotted it with the cloth and bent to get a closer look. “What will people think, seeing you at work tomorrow with a bandage on your head?”

  “They won’t think it’s my husband, that’s for sure.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  But I could feel her smiling as she said, “Maybe they’ll think you’ve got another man in your life now. A terrible, mean one.”

  A moment later, I heard the floor squeak behind me, and Debbie came around so I could see her standing just behind Lydie. “We got these,” she said, holding up a bandage and tape.

  Lydie went to get the scissors out of the drawer. As she taped on the bandage, she said, “There, now you have to agree to let me watch the kids in the morning.” I felt her finger running along the tape, making sure it stuck. Then she took a step back and tilted her head, considering me through sharp eyes. “It’s the only way I’ll know you forgive me.”

  15

  In the mornings now, I dropped off Joe and Debbie a little after six thirty. It was easier taking them to George and Lydie’s place rather than to my sister’s. We didn’t have to leave as early, and Joe and Debbie had more time to eat breakfast. And they liked getting to spend time with the Hughes family—George, especially. Other than John Charlie, he was the closest replacement for a father in their lives, and the fact that he didn’t try to fill the role made them love him all the more.

  I could tell that Lydie enjoyed having Debbie around, too. She had lived for years in a household of boys, all mud and stink and rough edges. One day Debbie came home from school with her hair in two neat little braids. I never braided her hair; the most we ever did with it was put it in a ponytail.

  I would have felt some jealousy, but Lydie was careful not to overstep. The very afternoon Debbie came home with those braids in her hair, Lydie called to tell me that she’d given both my children a cookie to put in their lunchboxes that morning. “I hope you don’t mind. I made them last night, and they made the house smell like cinnamon. And I was still getting the boys’ lunches together this morning, and Joe asked if I’d made snickerdoodles, so I just thought—”

  “It’s all right,” I cut her off. “I appreciate it. And Debbie’s hair looks nice, the way you did it.”

  “Oh, good, I’m glad you like it. We don’t have to rush in the morning, the way you do. We’ve got time for silly things like braiding hair.”

  She understood that it wasn’t a simple matter for me, having her watch my children in the morning. She thought it was because we weren’t family, and it was because of that, partly. But of course there was another cause. I didn’t know how to feel about our two families getting closer like that. It complicated things. It made it harder to think of George-and-me as something entirely separate from the world, a thing all alone.

  Meanwhile, days in the cafeteria were mostly the same, and that sameness held a kind of novelty for me, even months after I’d started working there. I liked being around people who weren’t family or neighbors or church folk. I liked working with women I’d never have known otherwise. None of the others were from outside town, and they thought I was some kind of special creature for having lived my whole life on a farm, with a barn and a well and fields of waving corn stretching out in every direction. “Isn’t that strange,” said Betty Ann one day after I’d been telling her about the livestock we had before Karol died, “to think that the milk that shows up on my doorstep might’ve used to come from your place out there?”

  “It sure would be strange,” I replied, “since we haven’t had a dairy cow since before I was married.”

  “But you just said you and your husband raised cattle.”

  “Beef cattle,” I said. “They’re different things.”

  She flipped another potato into the giant bowl between us. We’d peeled about twelve dozen and had many more to go. “But surely one can do the other.”

  “They can, but that doesn’t mean they should. It’s different kinds,” I explained. “Different purposes.”

  “Oh, well.” She laughed and made a face. Betty Ann was always one to laugh at her own nonsense.

  The job expanded the scope of my world. I was no longer the lonely queen of an empty house, moving through rooms filled with memories and ghosts. There had been days in the first few months after Karol’s death when I’d gone through the house and touched various items of furniture one after another, almost as if I were taking inventory: dining table, hutch, television, sofa. I wasn’t trying to drum up images from the past, to remember, Yes, there, that’s the spot Karol showed a five-year-old Joe how to do the two-step, and that’s where we were standing that time he grabbed my arm and made as if to shove me, and then stopped, and turned, and strode out of the room. Instead, I believe I was touching those pieces of furniture to reassure myself that they were still there. After all that had happened, despite the big jagged canyon that had opened up in my world the day he died, I could still lay my palm flat against the painted wood dresser and say, This is mine, this is still here. Its cool slick surface would comfort me in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone. I didn’t care to try. It was a thing almost like the act of love, a physical impulse that wouldn’t bear being put into words.

  In January I was still working, even though it was the spring semester and Mrs. Brainerd had originally said she wasn’t sure whether there would be a place for me then. But I didn’t feel like I was on solid ground yet. I was filling in for a girl named Kate who’d had a baby. No one seemed to know whether she’d be coming back. Betty Ann, who’d gone over to visit once she was home from the hospital, claimed there was no way: “If you saw her face,” she said. “Like the Madonna herself looking down at that child. She won’t want to leave him, I’d lay money on it right now.”

  Betty Ann may have been sure, but there hadn’t been any official word from Kate, and though it wasn’t like Mrs. Brainerd to leave things up in the air, I figured she put up with it because from what I’d heard Kate was a lovable type who couldn’t do any wrong. People made exceptions for her, even Mrs. Brainerd, who normally wouldn’t accept one of us so much as taking a bathroom break without informing her first.

  Not knowing whether the golden Kate would want her job back, I felt as if I were on probation. I tried to show myself to be a good and reliable worker. I got there early each morning, before any of the other girls. The first thing I did was put my purse and coat in the standing wardrobe near the backdoor. Then I’d tie on a clean apron. The aprons were stacked on a shelf next to the wardrobe, and it made me glad to see them starched and white and folded with precision, the signal of a clean start every day. Putting one on made me switch over, from home to work: I went from being the authority to being the one taking orders.

  Next, I’d go find Mrs. Brainerd in the little office i
n the back, or in the stockroom where the giant bins of flour and sugar were kept, and the giant cans of tomatoes, the peas and the lima beans and the applesauce. We had a big walk-in freezer for the meat, but she was never in there when I arrived in the morning. I suspect she had a fear of getting locked in the cold. Wherever I found her, when she glanced up and saw me she’d give a little nod. “You made it” was her usual greeting. Then she’d put me to work breaking down chickens or chopping onions, and within ten minutes all the rest of the girls would be there, too, and we’d slide into our morning routines, readying ourselves for the stampede of hungry teenagers that came rushing through the doors at eleven o’clock every day. I liked the energy, the loud bursts of conversation, the laughter everywhere. Those children liked to laugh—much more than my sisters and I had at their age. Partly it was for show (the girls giggling behind their hands, the boys jostling one another and shouting across the room); mostly, though, it was the fact that they were living in a different world, and they knew it. They managed a carelessness that never would have occurred to me at their age.

  Yet even I had a whole new life now, and I felt as if I were quite literally stretching, using new muscles. Being around other people this often, I felt the need to smile more, even if I wasn’t laughing or feeling particularly glad. At the end of the day, my arms would hurt from lugging big trays of food from the counter to a cart. At night, sometimes my hands would go numb, which Mary L. told me was from all the chopping I did during the day. Our hands got so used to curling around a knife, she said, that when we slept they’d automatically go into that position. Hers had been doing it for years. She held them up as if I might see them go into spasms right then. All I could pay attention to was the long white scar across one palm. “Knife accident,” she told me, “about three years ago. Had to get thirteen stitches and then it got all infected, blew up to about twice its size.”