Getting Near to Baby Read online

  Seemed like Aunt Patty bossed everybody, even sweet Uncle Hob. Uncle Hobart. It didn’t used to be that anyone called him Hob. Mom said it was Aunt Patty who started that while they were still high school sweethearts. Pretty soon everybody was calling him Hob, like he was an elf in a fairy story or something. It didn’t bother Uncle Hob. He’s real sweet that way.

  The sad thing is, Mom said, Aunt Patty never had motherhood to lighten her. In other words, she didn’t have any children of her own. Myself, I wouldn’t call it sad. I’d been her niece for one week short of thirteen years and I hadn’t seen sign one that Aunt Patty was pining for children of her own. She just wanted to dress dolls.

  That day we went shopping, Aunt Patty took us to this cafeteria to eat lunch. There were little hot-tables set all around and we could pick out anything in the world we wanted to eat. Fried chicken, pork chops cooked with green beans, meatballs in gravy. On a cold table, there were stacks of sandwiches on plates. Every kind of sandwich we could imagine, wrapped in clear plastic.

  Little Sister and I picked out sandwiches because, as I whispered to her, they were probably cheaper. Aunt Patty had spent an awful lot of money on us in only one day. I decided tuna fish for me, peanut butter and jelly for Little Sister.

  “Oh, no, don’t never eat tuna outside of your own kitchen,” Aunt Patty said, the moment she saw what we were choosing. “Here, have a ham and cheese, it’s safer.”

  Then she whispered to Little Sister, “Won’t you have ham and cheese too? If you pick peanut butter and jelly, people will think we can’t afford better.”

  Now, I understood why Aunt Patty would need to warn us about the tuna fish. I was glad she told me because I never knew it wasn’t safe to eat. It was obvious there was a lot we didn’t know about what was safe to eat outside our own home. But to put back peanut butter and jelly because it didn’t cost enough, that was pure silliness.

  I kept quiet about it, though. I know I ought to be polite to my elders. Little Sister, for her part, ate ham and cheese with mustard even though she hates mustard.

  There was one good thing to come out of the day, I guess. While we were shopping, I found a chocolate shop. The way it happened, we walked by an open door with this sweet rich smell wafting on outside. I couldn’t tell what kind of store it was right off. The window was full of dolls and paper flowers and books and even a little table with a tea set.

  I let Aunt Patty and Little Sister go on ahead. I hung back to stand in front of the open door. I breathed deep of that lovely smell. And looked at these glass cases like I’d seen in a bakery, all filled with trays of what looked like small brown ice cubes. I didn’t have time to figure out what they were because by then Aunt Patty had noticed I was no longer right beside her and had come back to yell in my ear.

  “Don’t ever disappear on me like that, Willa Jo.” She probably didn’t mean to yell. Aunt Patty’s voice just naturally gets louder when she’s excited. “It’s not like you’ve never seen a candy store before,” she said.

  I already knew it was best to follow Uncle Hob’s example and make my voice lower and calmer so that after a while Aunt Patty will settle down. In the kind of voice I’d use in the library, I said, “This isn’t any ordinary candy store, Aunt Patty.”

  “Well, maybe not,” Aunt Patty said, eyeing the window.

  “Take a whiff of that smell,” I said quietly.

  “I wonder if that tea set is for sale.”

  “Let’s go in and find out,” I said. The prospect of buying that tea set made all the difference. Aunt Patty loves to decorate her tabletops and she adores china. Especially figurines.

  We bought the tea set and a chocolate apiece. “I guess one piece won’t hurt,” Aunt Patty said. Little Sister and I shook our heads. It wouldn’t hurt a bit.

  Aunt Patty saved hers for Uncle Hob. “My special treat is the tea set,” she said. “Besides, chocolate goes straight to my hips.” Which I had to agree was not a place where Aunt Patty needed another single thing to go. I didn’t say so, of course.

  “That’s the best chocolate I ever had,” was what I did say, managing to lick my fingers before wiping them on the tissue Aunt Patty held at the ready. “Maybe we ought to get a box to take home.”

  “Chocolate will rot your teeth,” Aunt Patty said.

  “Now you tell me,” I said, the way Mom would have if she were there. Too late, I remembered that Aunt Patty never gets Mom’s jokes. Aunt Patty doesn’t even laugh at Carol Burnett.

  “Willa Jo, I’m going to let that pass,” Aunt Patty said, her lips going all thin with disapproval, “because I know you’ve learned from your mother to make remarks like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was. There was no telling how long we’d be staying with her. It would be better all around if we were getting along with each other.

  “I think we ought to try on some new shoes, don’t you,” Aunt Patty said. Her voice was still a little high but she was smiling. That’s how I knew I was being forgiven. Naturally I didn’t say I didn’t want to wear those ugly sandals.

  But I do hate brown leather sandals.

  4

  Don’t Do This, Don’t Do That

  There was a lot to get used to at Aunt Patty’s. For instance, nobody uses the front door here. We have to go through the garage and into the kitchen. Aunt Patty was real adamant about it. One day a magazine salesman came up to the front door and she wouldn’t even open it to tell him to go around. She went over to the window and knocked on it to get his attention, then pointed to the garage. He didn’t get it, so she had to go through the kitchen and out the garage onto the driveway to tell him how she preferred for everybody to come into the house from the garage so her carpet wouldn’t get tracked up. But she didn’t buy any magazines. After all that, she wouldn’t even let him come in.

  The plastic runners on the carpets were all we were allowed to walk on. The plastic runner that leads to the front door was pretty much useless, of course. There were comers in some rooms that had never known the touch of a human toe, nor any other, safe to say. Aunt Patty doesn’t hold with having pets.

  And the radio played all the time. I don’t know that Aunt Patty really listened to it. I think she was used to the noise. No matter what was going on, whether Aunt Patty was home or not, no matter if Uncle Hob was watching the news on the TV in the next room, in the kitchen on the counter Aunt Patty’s radio was on. I got used to it after a while, so I didn’t hear it either. Not much, anyway.

  Then there were the rules. No eating in any room but the kitchen. The dining room was for show. And the rule was no butts on the bed once the bed was made up. We couldn’t touch anything on the tabletops. Anyway, we weren’t supposed to touch the tabletops. Fingerprints, you know. The rules were clear, but as I say, it was a lot to get used to. There were a couple of misunderstandings.

  We learned right off not to use the bath powder.

  “It’s not that I mind you using it.” Aunt Patty’s voice stirred the cloud of bath powder hanging in the air. “Did we use too much?” I asked nervously. Bath powder was an expense, I knew.

  “No, no, honey.” Aunt Patty’s voice was shrill with being afraid she had hurt our feelings. “But I don’t fluff it around so much when I use it, that’s all. Not so much of it ends up on the floor and on the top of the toilet seat and such.”

  She was good about it, really.

  Aunt Patty kept a narrow cabinet on the landing where the staircase turned the comer. There was a glass front on this cabinet and six shelves inside. Aunt Patty’s Hummels were set on those shelves. Hummels being little china figurines of children carrying umbrellas on a rainy day, or bending over to pet a puppy. Like that. My favorite is a little girl on a swing.

  Little Sister took a shine to those Hummels right off. Every trip up or down the stairs was an opportunity to do a fresh study of them. But she already knew about the tabletops; I never thought she’d open up that glass door. I don’t even know when she did it. The first I
knew of anything was when Aunt Patty was on her way downstairs and made this sound like a chicken in the mood to lay an egg. A soft kind of squawk. I looked up to see her standing before that cabinet. Her eyes were wide, but she was silent with concentration. Just like that chicken I mentioned. Then she hooked her fingers under the cuffs of her shorts and gave them a sharp little snap—and opened up her cabinet.

  Little Sister was playing jacks on the carpet at the foot of the stairs. The ball wouldn’t bounce, of course, so she threw it in the air instead. She couldn’t catch it very often, but she always picked up a jack anyway. She never once looked up while Aunt Patty stood in front of the cabinet. Curious now, I got up to take a look.

  All the Hummels had been moved around. Not just rearranged, but rearranged so that the little boy petting a dog appeared to be in the company of the boy playing a pennywhistle. It looked like they were about to be joined by a boy rolling a hoop. All the figurines had been set up so that they made friendly little groups, or became families, or seemed to be trying to talk to one another. Aunt Patty lines them up like soldiers.

  She started to set them back in their proper places. But after she’d moved three or four, Aunt Patty changed her mind and put them back the way Little Sister had them. She closed the cabinet and with the look of someone with an errand to run, settled herself in a chair with a magazine. If someone flipping pages that fast could be called settled.

  Oh, and there were the newts.

  Small reddish-brown newts lived in the woods behind Aunt Patty’s house and in the woods across the road. At home, we don’t have so many trees close by. If we wanted a newt, we had to drag our fingers through the mud at the edge of the pond, and if we were lucky, we might find one or two. But the first rainy day at Aunt Patty’s led to a wonderful discovery.

  The rain brought out newts by the hundreds. They were in the grass, on the driveway, crossing the patio. Everywhere we looked, newts were out taking a stroll, lifting their short legs like so many little wind-up toys. They were a sight to see, but at two in the afternoon, Aunt Patty has her eyes trained on her soap operas.

  “Willa Jo? Willa Jo, come in here and tell me you don’t think this boy’s hair is bleached. Do you see those dark roots or is that my imagination? What is this world coming to, when there will not be a single soul wearing their own hair color?”

  After we decided he might just have sun-streaked hair, Aunt Patty went on to fill me in on practically every person on this soap opera. Who was married to who else first, and so on. It was fairly interesting. So neither Aunt Patty nor I paid much attention to the open and close of the back door. Even though I remember it opened and closed pretty often. It was not until the soap opera ended, and Aunt Patty offered to put out some milk and cookies, that we found Little Sister had started a collection.

  “I’ll have an iced tea and sit with you girls,” Aunt Patty was saying. “Aah,” she screamed. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

  I ran into the kitchen to find Aunt Patty standing with both arms outstretched before her as if she might try to catch her kitchen sink if it should up and run away. Being Aunt Patty’s sink, it might. It was swarming with newts, thirty or forty of them, at a guess.

  Little Sister chose that moment to come in through the screened-in porch. She was wet, she’d wiped a muddy streak across her cheek, and she had a slug glued to her ankle. She looked about as happy as I had seen her in months. She stopped dead at the sight of Aunt Patty’s horrified face. One hand still on the door latch, with the other hand she held two or three wriggling newts pressed against her shirtfront.

  “Oh, my stars and garters,” Aunt Patty moaned. “What am I going to do now?”

  It was easy, really. No one had to tell Little Sister those newts would have to go. She turned right around and headed out again. I got an aluminum pie plate and put about ten newts in it to carry them back out. Of course, they started escaping the pie plate the instant I put them in, and some of them managed it before I could get out of the kitchen. But newts are easy to catch. It wasn’t all that long before Aunt Patty could scrub the sink with Comet and mop the floor twice with Spic and Span.

  Outside, I found an extra garbage can lid which we filled with matted leaves and water. Little Sister put some newts in this makeshift pond. But by then, I had the feeling she was doing it because it seemed to make less trouble.

  5

  A Tough Nut to Crack

  I look out over the countryside, like I am enjoying the view. Aunt Patty has been thinking things over for three or four minutes. For three or four minutes it has been nearly peaceful out here once more.

  “Your momma would shoot me if she knew what all you were doing,” Aunt Patty calls up to me on the roof. She knows it isn’t true. Mom won’t step on a bug. I don’t even look down; I stare off into the woods beyond the bungalows. “She would die of embarrassment if she knew,” Aunt Patty says.

  Little Sister must think this might be true, because she scoots forward suddenly to look down at Aunt Patty. Mrs. Biddle is startled by Little Sister’s quickness, one hand flies up to grip the neckline of her dress. I was startled too, so I have Little Sister’s nightgown in my grasp again.

  Only Aunt Patty has not noticed anything. She is not looking up, but is looking off to one side. “This child is stubborn as cement,” she mutters to herself, but both Mrs. Biddle and I have heard her.

  “She’s not as bad as all that,” Mrs. Biddle says in a voice with only the slightest quaver, considering Little Sister has given her such a scare.

  “She is. She is what my very own momma would have called a tough nut to crack,” Aunt Patty says. “My momma knew what she was talking about every day of her life.”

  And then she says, “I’m going to have to call the sheriff, I guess.” She crosses her arms over her bosom. This is something she does when she has come to a decision. I have a sudden awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I’m about to be in big trouble. Little Sister scooches closer to me by a few more inches, close enough that the hair on our arms touches.

  “There’s a bad idea,” Mrs. Biddle says. “He won’t do anything but call the fire department.”

  “Well, that’s who I’ll call then,” Aunt Patty says. Aunt Patty’s large bosom is heaving, and she is resting her fists on the mounds that serve as her hips. I wish Aunt Patty wouldn’t talk to us this way. Little Sister is kind of afraid of Aunt Patty as it is. She might never climb down now.

  “Do you hear me, Willa Jo?” Aunt Patty asks. Aunt Patty sounds as hard as a church pew. “I’m going to call the fire department on you. They’ll come take you down like a cat out of a tree.”

  “If you do, I might jump,” I say. At the same time I clamp my fingers around Little Sister’s arm and pull back. I don’t want Little Sister to believe me. But I am satisfied to see Aunt Patty’s face go all smooth and calm in the way it does when she is confronted with a garden snake. Aunt Patty thinks if she pretends to be calm, she is.

  She goes on like she never heard what I said. “The fire department will probably notify the authorities, and then I’ll be arrested. Do you want me to get arrested, Willa Jo?”

  At this, I scoot back so I cannot be seen. Not by Aunt Patty, anyway So does Little Sister. “Willa Jo?” And after a moment, “Willa Jo, are you coming back inside?”

  After another moment, she goes back into the house, her slippers hitting the bottoms of her feet. “Hob,” I hear her calling. And then silence.

  “I suppose you’ve got your reasons for doing this,” Mrs. Biddle says in the gentle way she has. Mrs. Biddle nods, smiling even. “I don’t suppose you girls are going to come down one minute sooner than when you are ready to,” Mrs. Biddle says, and looks as if she is waiting for an answer.

  It would be rude to say, “No, ma‘am, I don’t guess we are.” The safest thing is to shake my head. So I am trying to decide whether the right answer would be a shake of the head for no, we won’t, or a nod, for yes, that’s right. Mrs. Biddle doesn’t know what I�
��m thinking, though, and she goes right on to say, “You aren’t doing this to be mean to your aunt Patty, are you?”

  I shake my head, no, we aren’t.

  “Well, that’s good,” Mrs. Biddle says as if she is talking to very good girls. “I know it’s not the same as having your mother near you. But your aunt Patty’s doing the best she can.” This last is said in a way that brings tears to my eyes.

  Things don’t feel right here. I want to open my eyes in the morning to see my very own wallpaper with the tiny blue flowers and pink rosebuds. Aunt Patty does not believe in putting up wallpaper, not even in the bathroom. She says mold grows behind it. I want the quiet of my mother’s kitchen, where the only noise is the rustle of dry cereal shaken out of a box, the coffee percolating in the pot and the crackle of the newspaper as Mom turns the pages. Aunt Patty never touches a newspaper. She says the ink comes off on her fingers. And she never turns off that radio.

  I want Mom to read to us for an hour before bedtime, all of us in a clump like alligators in the sun so we can all look at the pictures together. Aunt Patty is too tired after dinner to do anything but watch television. She kisses us on the forehead and tucks us into bed before it is even full dark. We want our mom. We’re worried about her having to sleep all alone. We worry that she doesn’t eat right, now that she doesn’t have us to feed. We miss her.

  I hear Aunt Patty’s bossy voice, rousing Uncle Hob out of his bed. She’s telling him he has to come outside to order us down. Or to plead with us, whichever he thinks will work. That sad feeling I have hardens into a mad feeling and I don’t think I’ll ever get down off this roof. I’ll stay here till kingdom comes.

  When Uncle Hob comes out, he is still in his blue-and-white-striped pajamas. I know this because I can see the legs sticking out from beneath his raincoat. Uncle Hob must not have a robe. He has probably never before needed a robe since he doesn’t come out of the bedroom, most mornings, until he is dressed and ready for the day.