“What?” I said, gawking at her.
“A ladybug,” Mallie said. “You just lift your big feet and march out in that yard and catch me a ladybug.”
“A ladybug?” I said, and she aimed a wallop at me that would have knocked me through the wall if she hadn’t pulled it short. I ran but I put my head through the back door and said, “A ladybug?” and she said, “And some dandelions, if you can find any.”
I figured she was crazy but I hunted around until I found a couple of dandelions. One of them had a ladybug on it so I took them both in to Mallie and she said, “Fine. Now get me the box of starch in the pantry and if you see any wax bring it along.”
By this time I knew she was crazy. When I came back with the starch and a bottle of floor wax, Dottie and my mother were standing in the kitchen and Mallie was saying, “So we can fix up a party dress in no time.”
“But how?” Mother asked. Dottie was still all dressed up from the afternoon and every time anyone looked at her she giggled.
“I’m going to the spring dance,” she told me with a sweet smile. “Robert Dennison came by this afternoon and asked me to go.”
“He must be crazy,” I said.
I sat on the kitchen table and watched while Mallie sent Dottie upstairs for a bed sheet and Mother into the attic to dig out the blue taffeta curtains we had in the living room of our other house. While they were gone I asked Mallie, “Are you going to make a dress for Dottie?”
“That’s right,” she said. She had the starch and the wax and the dandelions and the ladybug on the table next to me and she was looking at them, figuring them out.
“Out of this stuff?” I said. “How?”
“Like making a pie,” she explained. “You just get all the things it’s made of and then you stir them together right.”
Dottie came back with the bed sheet as Mother came in with the curtains.
“Now then,” Mallie said. She made Dottie take off her dress and stand there in her slip. Then she took the bed sheet and draped it around Dottie’s waist, so that it made a sort of skirt down to the floor in all directions. Not much like a skirt, though—it looked a lot like a sheet. Dottie stood there looking at Mother as though she didn’t know what to do. Mother was worried, too, and finally she said, “Really, Mallie, it’s not necessary—we can probably afford a new dress for Dorothy.”
“You just stop worrying,” Mallie said. “We can’t buy Dottie a dress and still have new slipcovers in the living room and that furniture looks pretty shabby. You leave things to me.” She took the curtains and fastened them around Dottie, so that soon all of them except one made an overskirt over the sheet, and the one left she pulled around Dottie’s shoulders to make a top for the dress. “There now,” she said. She stood back and stared at Dottie and poor Dottie certainly looked silly. She looked as if she were dressed up for Halloween. But she stood there, being a good sport the way she can, sometimes, and Mother and I just watched.
Mallie took the dandelions and fastened them on the neck of the dress. She sprinkled some of the floor wax on the skirt and a little starch on the bed sheet underneath that was like a petticoat. Finally she set the ladybug carefully on the bed sheet. Then she stood back and smiled and said, “You’ll look real nice in that.”
Mother couldn’t stand it any longer. She said, “Oh, Mallie,” and almost cried. And I thought it was pretty mean to take a girl who wanted a new dress and pin her up in curtains and then say she looked nice.
“My chicken in the oven!” Mallie said suddenly, and opened the oven door. “Thank goodness,” she said, lifting it out. “Missy, you take off all that stuff and get ready for dinner.”
Well, Mother just looked at Dottie and me hard, meaning we weren’t to say anything more, and Dottie got out of the curtains and sheets as fast as she could and we sat down to dinner. Even though the chicken was fine, we didn’t eat very much—we were all watching Mallie, who went along with her affairs singing to herself as though she had forgotten all about Dottie’s dress.
Mallie went home after dinner without saying any more about the dress. When we were sitting in the living room Mother said to Dottie, “Dear, please don’t worry about the dress. I think Mallie really thought she was helping, making a joke, perhaps.”
“Where did she come from?” I asked. “I just walked in at lunch-time and there she was.”
“That’s about the way she came,” Mother said. “I was waxing the living room floor this morning and I turned around and saw Mallie standing there in the doorway watching me. I was scared for a minute, but she does look harmless.”
I thought of Mallie’s round pink face and laughed.
“Anyway,” Mother said, “she wouldn’t answer any questions, but just said she had come to help. And she took the mop away from me. Have you noticed,” Mother asked, “that when Mallie says to do something you do it, without asking any questions?”
“Golly,” I said, thinking about the ladybug.
“Honestly” Dottie said, “I couldn’t even move to take off that stuff she kept putting on me. Honestly, I was shading.”
“She’s a good cook, though,” I put in.
“She seems to be a very kind and generous person,” Mother said. “It’s so hard to get anyone to help around a house these days that even if she is a bit eccentric…”
“It seems to me,” I said very thoughtfully, “that if Mallie has decided to keep on coming to help us, we can’t stop her. Not if she’s made up her mind, that is.”
“Stop her?” Dottie said. “Not likely.”
“What troubles me,” Mother said slowly, “is how she made those pies we had for lunch. When she came in and took the mop away from me I went upstairs to tell Dottie about her and it was only about fifteen minutes later that she called us down for lunch.”
“And there were the pies,” Dottie said.
“I’m not worrying about where they came from,” I said, “just as long as there are some more.”
Well, that was the situation when we went to bed that night. The next day was Sunday. About eight o’clock in the morning the doorbell rang and I answered it. It was a big box, special delivery, for Dottie, so I left it outside her door and went back to bed. Dottie woke me up about an hour later. I could hear Mother saying, “Good heavens,” over and over again. Dottie had opened the box and found a dress. It gave me a jolt when I saw it—it was a dress with a blue taffeta skirt and top, and around the neck were little gold buttons like dandelions, and under the skirt was a stiff white ruffled petticoat. And what really took my breath away was that all over the white petticoat were printed thousands of little red ladybugs.
Well, Dottie put it on and it looked pretty good, for a dress, and we all went tearing down to the kitchen. Dottie ran up and kissed Mallie. While Dottie and Mother were both talking at once and poking and pulling at the dress I asked Mallie, “How’d you do it?”
“Magic,” she said, and winked at me.
That was the only answer she’d give, no matter what we asked her about the dress. That was the only answer we ever got. There was no question about Mallie herself, though. She came back every day and about twice a week she made doughnuts and at least once a week she made pies—sometimes cherry, sometimes lemon meringue, sometimes apple. Dottie went off to her dance in her new dress and woke everybody up trying to tiptoe upstairs when she came in. And then she kept me awake all night, sitting on the foot of Mother’s bed in the next room, the two of them giggling like dopes.
I got on the team that week, first as a substitute, and then the Hammond boy moved away and I got a chance at being regular pitcher. After a while Mallie started making Mother have breakfast in bed, and the house began filling up weekends with Dottie’s boyfriends, and twice they finished all the pie.
Somehow Mallie did everything so fast that it seemed as though she could straighten a room just by standing in the doorway and looking around hard. She used to get the dishes done so fast, Dottie and I never had time to get
in and help her. I used to ask her how she did it, even after Mother and Dottie got tired of asking questions that were never answered, but Mallie only laughed at me and said, “Magic.”
I think it was magic, too. Sometimes I’d bring the team home with me—there were about fifteen of us, counting substitutes—and we’d sneak over the fence as quietly as we could and tiptoe up to the back porch and by the time we got there Mallie would have lemonade and cookies ready for us, even if she’d been somewhere in the front of the house all the time and couldn’t have seen us.
Once Dottie, who had turned sweet-tempered and polite all of a sudden, came out into the kitchen and said, “I wish you’d teach me some of that magic, Mallie.”
Mallie was making a salad but she looked at Dottie and said, “What do you need magic for, Missy? You’re doing all right without any.”
“You know,” Dottie said. She sat down at the table next to me and Mallie just went on making the salad around us. “Look at all you can do—making dresses and doing housework without lifting a finger, and all that.”
“I only do work fast so’s I’ll have more time to do other things,” Mallie said. “Like trying to get dinner with two good-for-nothing lazy kids sitting smack in the middle of my salad. I’m real busy and busy people don’t have time for everything they want to do. So I make time.”
“That’s it,” Dottie said. “I’m real busy, too. I want to learn some magic.”
Mallie laughed. “Tell you what I’ll do, honey. I’ll teach you how to make a pie. That’s all the magic you’ll ever need.”
And golly if she didn’t teach Dottie right then and there how to make a pie; just pushed the salad off to one side and went to work. I could have laughed myself silly watching Dottie. It was the first time she had cooked anything in her life, I guess, and Mallie stood over her and really made her learn. It was a pretty good pie, too—apple. And after that Mallie taught Dottie a lot of other things—and she told Dottie over and over again, “That’s all the magic you’ll1 ever need.”
Then again, about a month later, when it was only a couple of days to the end of school and the weather was already hot, I came home from swimming with the fellows to find Mother out in the kitchen with a telegram. She was saying anxiously to Mallie, “It’s just got to be nice, that’s all. If we’d only known in time…”
It seems that the telegram had been misdirected and had reached Mother at five in the afternoon instead of in the morning as it should. It wouldn’t have done much good to know earlier anyway, because it was Sunday and we still wouldn’t have been prepared. The telegram said that Uncle Ralph and Aunt Gertrude were coming that evening on the six o’clock train and would stay over till Monday. They were an aunt and uncle of my dad’s and everyone tried to be nice to them because they were always nice to everybody in spite of being sort of fussy. Mother wanted to have a fancy dinner for them but all the stores were closed for Sunday. Mallie was thinking hard and Mother went on. “It means dinner tonight and fixing up the guest room and I don’t know what else.”
“Things will be all right,” Mallie said. “No use worrying.”
“Isn’t there some grocery open?” Mother said. “Jerry could run out and get something.”
“There’s Spencer’s,” I said. “I could get there and back in time but he doesn’t have much.”
“Just let me think,” Mallie said. Mother and I were both quiet while Mallie sat and figured. “I’ll tell you,” she said at last. “You just give me a little time. It ought to take you a good fifteen minutes to get to the station and another fifteen back. There’s a half hour. Then you sit your aunt and uncle down in the living room and give them a glass of that sherry we have in the pantry. That ought to make it about seven. If I can’t do anything by then we might’s well give up.”
“I’ll go to Spencer’s—” I suggested again, but she waved her hand at me.
“I can manage, thanks, son,” she said. “I just remembered that hat of yours, Mrs. Livingston, the one with the birds. I don’t like hats trimmed with birds but I guess I can stand it for once. You bring that right downstairs and, Jerry, you run and get me a handful of down out of a pillow and swipe your sister’s cotton dress with the pattern of cherries on it. Now, hurry.”
Well, I sneaked the dress out of Dottie’s closet and ripped open a pillow and got a handful of the stuffing, and tore down to the kitchen with it. Mother had brought in her hat with the two birds on it. It looked funny there on the kitchen table with the pillow down and Dottie’s dress.
“Get me some gravel,” Mallie said, and I brought her a handful from the driveway. So there they were—dress, hat, down, and gravel. I looked at her sort of cross-eyed and she said, “You march upstairs and change to some decent clothes. Thank goodness you’ve been swimming today—at least you’re clean.”
Dottie came in just as Mother and I were ready to go to the station, so we all three piled into a taxi and went to meet Uncle Ralph and Aunt Gertrude. And I was glad I had changed my shirt because they brought me a football and they brought some fancy girl’s stuff for Dottie, and Aunt Gertrude had embroidered an apron for Mother.
We sat in the living room and they had sherry until Mallie said dinner was ready. Mother sat at the head of the table and tried to look serious while we were eating, but she kept starting to laugh and so did I and it made everything cheerful. Because we had broiled squab with a cherry sauce, and once when Mother meant to tell me I was listening too much instead of eating, she slipped and said, “Jerry, eat your hat.” That made me choke and then all I could do was pass her the dish of wild rice and say very solemnly, “Have some gravel, Mother?”
We also had lettuce and tomato salad. When Mallie passed it I whispered to her, “Where did you get this?” and she said, “I picked it in the garden,” which shut me up.
And when Mallie brought the dessert I thought for a minute it was the down from the pillow but it turned out to be baked Alaska. Uncle Ralph stood up and bowed to Mallie at the end of dinner and said it was the finest meal he had ever tasted.
After dinner we sat around and talked for a while and then we all took Uncle Ralph and Aunt Gertrude up to the guest room. Mallie had done one of her fastest jobs on the room, and it was as neat and clean as anything you ever saw. There were fresh curtains, which looked suspiciously like the veil from Mother’s hat, and a big bunch of flowers in a bowl. I was the only one who noticed how much they looked like the flowers on the wallpaper in my room, although Aunt Gertrude asked what kind they were and no one knew. I said something to Mallie about it the next day and she laughed and took a swing at me, which I ducked, as usual.
Things went on like that all summer. Dottie started wearing a college fraternity pin but she gave it back before high school opened. Mother had something done to her hair and bought a lot of new clothes. And, as I said, I got to be captain of the team and a pretty good pitcher after all. And then one day while we were all having lunch together in the kitchen Mallie said, “Mrs. Livingston, I’ve got to be thinking about leaving one of these days.”
We all tried to argue with her but no one could convince her. All I could say, finally, was “Will you come back and see us sometime?” and she said, “Not unless you need me for something.” Then she winked the way she always did and said, “But you’ll be hearing from me sooner or later.”
She wouldn’t say where she was going, or why, but she did say that she was getting old. She looked about sixty then, but she said she was really old.
“I find these days,” she said to Mother, “that instead of going upstairs to make the beds, I’d rather just sit in the kitchen and wish them done. And that’s not good.” She shook her head. “I’ve got to get off by myself and think myself younger.”
“You can make yourself younger?” Mother said real fast, but Mallie just laughed and said, “Only by thinking so, Mrs. Livingston. You wouldn’t be happy any younger than you are, not with two grown children. And you’d be surprised what’s coming along for
you.”
Mallie added that she would go in a week and then Dottie, who was, as I say, getting politer but not any smarter, said, “Listen, Dopey, before Mallie goes, why don’t you ask her to do something for that football team of yours?”
“Baseball, fathead,” I said.
“Get her to fix it for you,” Dottie said, “so you’ll win all the time.”
Well, there was a silly idea. Trust a girl to think of it. “Listen,” I told her very slowly and clearly so she could understand, “with me pitching, magic is not necessary.”
Mallie winked at me and pulled my hair. “Can’t use magic on boys, anyway,” she said. “Just wears away on their tough hides.”
Well, she left the next week and then school started again and summer ended. After a while we sort of stopped talking about Mallie, because so much was happening all the time. I used to think about her sometimes during baseball season or when I was eating a cherry pie that didn’t have much taste, and once in a while Mother would say how much she missed Mallie’s being so cheerful around the house. Then when Dottie was packing to go away to college she took out the blue dress with the dandelions on it and tried it on once more before she put it in her trunk.
“This was always one of my favorite dresses,” she said, looking dreamy. “I wore it to the spring dance with that boy—remember him?” she asked Mother and Mother nodded.
“You know,” Mother said slowly, looking at Dottie, “that dress is just as fresh now as it was when it came. I don’t believe it’s ever going to wear out.”
“It’s magic,” Dottie said. “I wore it to the spring dance and to the country club dance last summer and then the senior ball and I guess dozens of other times.”
“Remember dinner with Uncle Ralph and Aunt Gertrude?” I said. “Remember the gravel?”
“And my hat!” Mother said. We all laughed.
“I’ll never forget Dottie standing there all hung with curtains,” I said.
“Or your face when you saw the dress,” Dottie said. “Everyone asks me where I got it.”
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 28