Getting Near to Baby Read online

  “There they are,” Aunt Patty says and points up at us with a quick little motion of her hand before she crosses her arms again.

  Uncle Hob doesn’t say a word as he looks up at us. He doesn’t look mad, he doesn’t even look sad. He looks at us the way he looks at a crossword puzzle when he doesn’t know the answer.

  One of the neighbor ladies from down the street—her name is Mrs. Teasley—is walking by and stops when she sees us on the roof. She always looks like she is about to spit. She motions with one hand to Mrs. Biddle, something between a “come here” and a wave. Mrs. Biddle nods, hardly any encouragement, but Mrs. Teasley comes around the comer, along the street, up the driveway.

  “Hob,” Aunt Patty whines. And he puts an arm around Aunt Patty’s shoulders.

  There’s something about Uncle Hob, a soft look in his eyes—maybe it’s the glasses, but I don’t think so—that makes it easy for a person to pour their heart out to him. I don’t mean he always has the answer, unless it’s mathematical, of course. But when Uncle Hob agrees that “That is some serious problem you have there,” or maybe he chews his bottom lip and says, “It’s a dilemma,” you feel better, that’s all. I can see that’s how his arm around her shoulder works for Aunt Patty.

  Mrs. Teasley walks smartly, as if she’d meant to come see Mrs. Biddle all along. As if she has not noticed us after all. Once Mrs.Teasley stands beside Mrs. Biddle, she is bold as the spots on a giraffe. She doesn’t say a word but stares at us like she’s sight-seeing.

  “Do you see any broken ones?” Aunt Patty calls up to us in that voice she uses when we meet up with somebody in the Piggly Wiggly. I can’t think what she’s talking about and I stare back down at her. “Roof tiles,” she says. “Any broken ones?”

  A lot of things run through my mind awful fast. That Aunt Patty expects Mrs. Teasley to believe Little Sister and I are out here to check on the roof tiles. That it is only Uncle Hob’s arm around her shoulders that makes her strong enough to pretend anything at all. That I had not meant to embarrass Aunt Patty. That somehow I thought I could sit up here and never be noticed at all, not by anyone. Not even by Little Sister.

  When Little Sister followed me up here, I should have known that other people were bound to notice too. Not only Aunt Patty, but Mrs. Garber and anybody else who happened by. I wasn’t thinking. I was just feeling. Remembering. But now things are getting out of hand.

  “Willa Jo?” Aunt Patty calls.

  “Not yet,” I say. My voice sort of cracks and I have to clear my throat before I can go on. “I don’t see any yet. But there’s an awful lot of tiles.”

  “Well, check carefully now,” Aunt Patty says. Then she looks over her shoulder. “Good morning, Mrs. Teasley. My, aren’t we all the early birds?”

  “Are you trying to tell me you put those girls up to climbing out onto the roof, Patty Hobson?”

  “I’m not telling you a blessed thing, Mrs. Teasley,” Aunt Patty says, which is bald enough to be rude. But I don’t feel one bit sorry for Mrs. Teasley. Mrs. Potts probably called her to tell her to go take a look and see what Little Sister and I were up to.

  Uncle Hob clears his throat and says, “Since the girls are so well occupied, I believe I might have some of those pancakes you offered me, dumplin’.”

  “Pancakes?” Aunt Patty says. “Oh, the pancakes. Coming right up,” she says and allows Uncle Hob to take her into the house. But she sends one last nervous look in our direction.

  “Where are you off to at this hour, Helen?” Mrs. Biddle says to Mrs. Teasley.

  “Nowhere special. I’m taking a walk. A little hike. Good for the bones.”

  “Well, aren’t you the one. Can’t say how long it’s been that I felt up to a hike,” Mrs. Biddle says. “When you get back, you might stop by for a bite of berries and short-cake.”

  “I could do with a bit before I’m off into the wilds,” Mrs. Teasley says with what could only be called a girlish giggle. I sit up straighter. It’s the first suspicion I’ve had that Mrs. Teasley even knows how to smile. Before Mrs. Biddle turns away, she winks up at me.

  Little Sister and I watch the two old ladies make their way over Mrs. Biddle’s lawn, their voices high and enthusiastic. I realize at that moment, they are friends.

  6

  Forbidden Friends

  About a week after we’d gotten to Aunt Patty’s, Little Sister and I sat on the edge of the front patio, our feet in the grass. Aunt Patty sat in a porch chair that is shaped in a circle and filled in with something stretchy like a spider-web. She believes that chair is the best thing; she says it’s elegant. But it makes her look like a turtle that’s gotten flipped over on its back. Uncle Hob sat beside her in a plaid lawn chair that Aunt Patty liked to say looked cheap. Uncle Hob liked to tell her right back that he was not elegant, he was comfortable. He was not saying anything in that minute, though. He was picking out a new tune on his guitar.

  Uncle Hob doesn’t look like a guitar picker. He looks like somebody who reads a lot of books. It’s these big glasses he wears, I guess, too big for his face. They’re thick, too, like the bottoms of Coke bottles, Aunt Patty says, and she’s right. But all Uncle Hob reads is the newspaper, front to back. He does the crossword puzzle so fast you’d think the answers were written on the palm of his hand. He teaches mathematics at the high school.

  Across the street, nine little houses were all that was left of a bungalow colony for summer tourists. Supposedly there was a family, the Fingers, that spread itself through the more livable ones. Nine cottages, all of them needing fresh paint. Nine doors. Supposedly there were a lot of children in this family, so it worked out there was room enough for all of them this way. And enough bathrooms, too, I guess. Those bungalows, those Fingers, they were a mystery.

  “You’re not to associate with them,” Aunt Patty had said the first day we were there. “Those children play in the dirt like mole rats.”

  “Mole rats,” I’d said, my mind conjuring up a picture of big blind mice. “I never heard of mole rats.”

  “They’re creatures that dig in the dirt the whole day long,” Aunt Patty said. “I saw a show about them on the educational channel.”

  “They’re cute, but dusty,” Uncle Hob said, smiling in that way he did when he teased Aunt Patty.

  “They’re rats. There’s nothing cute about a rat,” Aunt Patty said.

  “They’re a kind of mongoose and you’ve got the name twisted around somehow,” Uncle Hob said.

  “There’s nothing cute about them,” Aunt Patty said again. “Especially the oldest girl. Mrs. Biddle claims she is no more than thirteen years old. If that’s so, someone should take her in hand. She’s not one bit better than she ought to be.”

  This was something Aunt Patty had said about me once or twice, and I still didn’t know that it meant anything. But I’d never lived so close to a girl anywhere near my own age. Those Fingers interested me, even if Aunt Patty hadn’t made them sound too appealing.

  “What are you staring at, Willa Jo?”

  “I’m not staring,” I said.

  “Well, then, what are you looking at?” Aunt Patty said to me as she flipped pages in a magazine. So far as I could tell, this was all Aunt Patty did with magazines. She didn’t stay turned to one page long enough to read it. Maybe she didn’t even look at the pictures.

  By the end of the first week, I’d stopped believing a lot of kids lived across the street anyway. Oh, there were lights on in the bungalows after dark, all right. But by daylight we didn’t notice even one child playing out there in the grass or crying or even walking around. I watched. A couple of trucks and a little red car turned into the driveway there every so often, turned in and disappeared into the woods behind, but that was it.

  “It’s like looking at a row of broken teeth,” Aunt Patty said to me as I continued to look across the road. The bungalows were no better and no worse than a lot of places people live but I didn’t say so. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t enough Aunt Patty
had her own opinion, she liked to have everyone else’s, too.

  Little Sister didn’t look like she heard Aunt Patty. She stared across the street, her chin resting on her knees. Sometimes I envied Little Sister. No one expected much of her. Not only because she was only seven years old, but because she wouldn’t talk. Sometimes I wished I’d thought of that.

  “Quit looking over there, I told you,” Aunt Patty said. “Get up and play or something.”

  We didn’t move.

  “I declare, Willa Jo,” Aunt Patty said. “If I didn’t understand you so well, I wouldn’t understand you at all.”

  I had no idea what Aunt Patty meant, but I turned to look at her.

  “ ‘Contrary,’ my momma used to say I was. They were moods took me, I guess,” Aunt Patty said. “Are you in a mood?”

  “No,” I said. I wasn’t having anything Aunt Patty had.

  “See there?” she said. “That’s just the kind of answer I would come up with. I drove my momma crazy.” She laid aside her magazine. “Maybe that’s why she died so young,” Aunt Patty said a little sadly.

  Little Sister listened hard to every word she heard about dying and the reason why. Since she wouldn’t talk, it was hard to say what kind of notions she was forming. “That isn’t why,” I whispered to Little Sister when her head came up.

  I probably could’ve lived with plastic carpet runners and the radio and the sandals. But then Aunt Patty took it upon herself to pick my friends. She didn’t seem to know that friends aren’t something one person picks out for another, like flowers in a shop. Or that sometimes they are growing like weeds at the side of the road.

  When Little Sister and I walked into town to get ice cream we stopped to sit on a log about halfway back home. The longer you walk with an ice cream in the heat, the faster it melts, until you have to put all your effort into licking. We were giving the ice cream our full attention so we didn’t notice company coming until she was about right in front of us.

  “Hey,” she said by way of introduction. “My name is Elizabeth Fingers. People call me Liz.” I recognized the name. But what Aunt Patty had failed to mention was that she was a regular string bean of a girl. Tall. Long straight black hair hanging to her hips, pale skin. She wore a straight skirt that stopped above her knees, like somebody who works in an office.

  “Willa Jo.” I stood up and put out my sticky hand to shake. I was not always so formal, but the moment seemed to call for it. Or her height did. She appeared to know it was disconcerting.

  “I’m five foot nine, but I’m still only thirteen,” she said.

  “I take after my uncle Beau on my momma’s side, who was more’n six feet by the time he was fifteen. He’s nineteen now and still growin’, although he’s slowed down some.”

  “How tall does that make him?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “Six foot seven. There’s nobody short in the whole family, but he’s a record breaker, Uncle Beau is.”

  I was trying to think of something else to say since she didn’t seem to mind that her family could be a matter of interest. But all that came to mind was dumb stuff like “Well, you must not have much use for step stools” or “Does everybody have to duck their heads when they go through doorways?” So I didn’t say anything.

  “Are you the one whose baby sister died?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry, then,” she said. “It made me cry just to hear about it. It must’ve broke your heart.”

  “This here is my other sister,” I said. “We call her Little Sister. She doesn’t talk.”

  “I know,” Liz said. “Mrs. Biddle is some taken with her.”

  “You visit with Mrs. Biddle?”

  “Everybody visits with Mrs. Biddle. You tasted her pound cake?”

  I hadn’t. Little Sister shook her head.

  “Well, it’s a mite hot for pound cake, I guess. But when the weather cools, you shouldn’t miss it.”

  “I don’t know that we’ll be here that long,” I said.

  “Your aunt Patty signed you up for Sunday school,” Liz said, as if that meant we were there for life.

  I’d begun to like Liz. “Will we see you there?” Aunt Patty could hardly object to me associating with somebody at Sunday school. Why, she might never even know.

  “I don’t attend,” Liz said. “My momma might need me to take the little one outside during the service.”

  I nodded. No question. There were plenty of reasons why a momma of so many children would want to keep her eldest daughter close by. The funny thing is, it squeezed my chest, thinking of it.

  “It’s good of your momma to spare you,” Liz said. “She must miss you something fierce.”

  I nodded. I felt a polite response was called for. But my eyes stung with quick tears and to my horror, they started to slide down my face. I gasped and sobbed once, and breathed too deep and choked.

  “Oh, hey, now, I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Liz said. “I know,” I said.

  But I sat back down and cried anyway. So then Little Sister welled up and ran over too. In no time, Liz was sitting with her arms around both of us and she had big fat tears of sympathy on her cheeks.

  “Sorry,” I said when I was cried out. Neither of us had a hanky. We were about to resort to using our shirttails when Little Sister pulled several pink paper napkins out of a deep pocket of her shorts. They were from that restaurant Aunt Patty took us to. She passed them around and we all blew our noses.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” I said.

  “Don’t be embarrassed by honest feelings, that’s what my momma would say,” Liz said.

  7

  After Baby Died

  After Baby died, times were hard. Funerals cost a lot of money. And they make you feel tired, real tired, for weeks after. What it comes down to in the end, you stop doing everything but what you have to do.

  We didn’t bother about making the bed or doing the laundry. We didn’t wash dishes until there wasn’t one left in the cupboard. We ate from the garden, whatever picked quick, and something in a can from the pantry Tuna fish or Vienna sausages. Eggs from our chickens. We didn’t worry about breakfast, lunch or dinner. We ate whenever we were hungry.

  Mom paints the pictures for greeting cards, and what she had to do was work most of the time. We didn’t keep regular hours, but we’d stop whatever we were doing at sunrise or sunset. Mom would say, “Let’s go out and sit on the steps and watch the sun paint the sky.” We would sit together, out back or in front, leaning on each other. Even if all was not right with the world, it was in those moments at least pretty good. But Little Sister still did not speak.

  One night there was a midsummer chill in the air and Mom made hot chocolate while we got into our pajamas. Then we all piled into the bed to watch the sun come up. We’d all been sleeping together since Baby died. It was less lonely that way.

  Mom told us a story of Baby wanting to see some angels about some terribly important matter. She told how the angels let Baby come to them, but then they loved her so much they couldn’t bear to send her back. There was more, I think, about how we would see her again someday, but not real soon, not till we were awful old, because we need each other here. Baby had the angels and we had each other.

  If there was anything after that, I don’t remember. I don’t even remember falling asleep. It was way later in the day when I woke up, when we all woke up to the sound of Aunt Patty’s voice. “What is going on here?” she said like she’d come upon ink stains in her tablecloth. “Noreen, is there something wrong with you?”

  Mom had pushed herself up on an elbow with the first remark from Aunt Patty and now she sat up completely in the bed. “Patty, what’s the matter?”

  “That’s what I am asking you.”

  “We’re taking a nap,” Mom said in a bewildered way.

  “It’s the middle of the day.”

  “That’s when people take naps.”

  “That’s when children take
naps,” Aunt Patty said. “That’s when grown women watch the soap operas and do their ironing. What is that smell?”

  “Turpentine,” Mom said, although she knew Aunt Patty knew what that smell was. “I’ve been painting.”

  “You’ve been painting,” Aunt Patty said. It’s when Aunt Patty starts to repeat words back to you that you’re in the most trouble. Aunt Patty has very particular ideas about how things ought to be done.

  “I want you girls to get out of those pajamas,” she said. “Get some clothes on.”

  Little Sister and I scrambled right out of bed. We didn’t even think to ask Aunt Patty where she had come from so suddenly. How she happened to come halfway across the state without calling to ask, would we be home when she got here. Not any one of us, not even Mom.

  We certainly never thought of telling Aunt Patty to butt out. Aunt Patty was her big sister and Mom was used to listening to her. It was only one short step to doing whatever Aunt Patty told her to do.

  What bothered me, Mom would never tell Aunt Patty how things were. She never said we were short of money. She never told Aunt Patty how tired we all were. Especially Mom. Sometimes she was so tired her paintbrush shook.

  We were no sooner dressed than Aunt Patty told us to go outside and play. “What you girls need is some air,” she said. “What this whole place needs is air.” She began to throw the windows open all over the house.

  Aunt Patty is just a force when an idea takes her this way. The best thing to do is get out of her way. Little Sister and I went out but we sat down on the steps where we could hear every word Mom and Aunt Patty said.

  “I can’t believe the state you have let yourself get into,” Aunt Patty said. “You are skinny as a rail. Will you look at your hair? Have you combed it in a week? Have you bathed, Noreen? Even your children have lost flesh; they can’t be eating properly.”

  There were spaces in between where Mom could have said something back if she would. But she didn’t.