Ask Anybody (5 page)

“You want me to make some dessert?” I said.

“Pamela doesn't eat dessert.”

“I mean for me and the boys. Some Jell-O, maybe? With whipped cream.”

“Pamela doesn't use cream.”

Well, bully for her. “How's Plotsie doing?” I asked, to get off the subject of Pamela.

“I'm sorry to say Plotsie seems to be at a standstill. I'm trying to think up a new sequence for him to get involved in.”

“Dad,” I said. We almost never get a chance to talk, what with the boys around. “Dad, do you think you and Mom will ever get together again?”

He threw some hamburger into the pot and stirred. “I don't know,” he said. “Your mother's a free spirit. There's no sense trying to hold her when she wants to be off. No sense at all.”

“But we're her children,” I said. “She's got no business going off and leaving us.” I tried to keep the anger I felt out of my voice and wasn't too successful.

He looked at me, surprised. “Why don't you tell her that?” he said. “Maybe she'd listen to you.”

Sidney came in. “Mrs. Edwards gave me a teddy bear,” he said. “She says it's mine. It's got holes where its eyes was.”

“Were,” my father said.

“Were what?” Sidney asked, puzzled.

“Eyes were. Not eyes was.”

Tad wandered through on his way to the bathroom. I could tell because he was clutching himself. Tad always clutches himself when he has to go to the bathroom. My mother says he'll outgrow it. I certainly hope so. For his sake.

A car pulled up outside. Pamela breezed in without knocking. She must feel pretty secure with my mother out of the country. She pressed cheeks with my father, who was busy making salad dressing. “Watch it,” he cautioned. “You almost made me spill the vinegar.”

She drew back and said, “Sorry.” Then she said, “Hi, kids.” Tad stepped up his pace and kept on walking and clutching. Sidney said he had to go check on his teddy bear.

“What can I do to help?” Pamela said in that way people have when they expect to be told, “Absolutely nothing.”

“How about cleaning the oven?” I said. “It's a mess.” I laughed in a phony way to show her I was only kidding. It's true that I hate phoniness, as I said, but am sometimes guilty of it myself.

Pamela shot me a look loaded with daggers behind my father's back.

“I can always set the table,” she said. “If you show me where you keep the knives and forks.” She's only been here for supper about ten times.

I heard someone knocking on the back door and went to see who it was.

“My mama says can we borrow a cup of sugar and some eggs,” Nell said, stepping into our mud room as if she belonged. “We're baking us a cake.”

“Dad,” I said, “this is our new neighbor, Nell Foster. She moved into the Johnsons' house.”

My father wiped his hands on his pants and shook Nell's hand. “How are you?” he said. I explained what she wanted, and he said, “Help yourself.” She followed me into the pantry and took him at his word.

“I'll just take some of these”—her hand dipped into the egg box—“and you might as well give me two cups of sugar. I like a real sweet cake. Oooooh, you got sprinklies,” she said. “I just love sprinklies.” She meant those colored things you sprinkle on top of cakes and cookies. She took a few handfuls of them and watched me as I put the eggs and the sugar into a bag. “I'll just load these into my pocket,” she said, letting the sprinklies slide through her fingers and into her big pockets.

“Find what you want?” my father asked. Nell smiled and nodded, checking out our kitchen. Pamela stayed where she was, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sherry, unable to find the knives and forks. I had the feeling Nell knew what brand of stove we had and what kind of soap powder we used.

“I hear my mama calling me,” she said, and the door banged behind her. No thanks, no nothing.

“There's a kid who'll go places,” my father said. “She has all the confidence of a great beauty.”

Pamela fluttered her eyelashes. “Hard as nails,” was her verdict. I watched Nell cross the snowy field between our houses and wished I had some of her nerve.

Next morning she was at the bus stop before us, her brothers looming darkly behind her, cracking their knuckles, chucking snow at the hawks skimming over the pine trees.

I figured she could say, “Hi,” first. All she said was, “You sure don't look like your ma, do you? She's pretty.”

“That's not my mother,” I snapped. “My mother's in Africa, taking photographs of wild animals.”

Nell rolled her tongue around in her mouth, digesting what I'd said. Then she leaned toward me and said in a low voice, like she was a CIA agent telling me classified information, “My Uncle Joe's driving his truck all the way to Pennsylvania today. He might not be back for a week.”

Africa was nothing compared to that, all right.

“Maybe he'll send you a postcard,” I said in a super-nasty voice.

“If that wasn't your mama, who was it?” Nell said.

“A friend,” I said, shrugging.

“Oh, yeah? Whose friend? Yours or your daddy's?” I was lucky. She didn't wait for an answer. Putting her hand over her mouth, she hissed at me, “I know how to kiss so's their tongue tingles.”

“How?” I asked, wanting to hear her answer very much.

The bus rumbled to a stop just then, and Bill swung open the door.

“Cold enough for you?” he said, grinning.

Nell was up the steps and into the bus like a shot. She sat directly behind the driver's seat. I followed her in and walked to the back of the bus. If she wanted to tell me how she made their tongues tingle, she knew where to find me.

9

“That lady I met at your house, she your daddy's girl friend?” Nell asked me next day on the bus. She nudged me in the ribs and shot me a sly glance.

I pulled away from her a little. “My mother and father are divorced,” I said. “But they live in the same house. We've got lots of room.”

“I bet.” She laughed. “Whatdya take me for, an idjit?”

I shrugged. “It's the truth. Take it or leave it. My father works at home. So does my mother, when she's not off on an assignment. They figure it's easier if we all stay under one roof.” Why was I telling her all this? It was none of her business.

“Now I've heard everything.” Up close I could see Nell's eyes were shadowed with smudged lavender circles, the color of a bruise. She smiled a little, and I saw one of her front teeth was chipped. She wore a dark skirt that came well below her knees, and a rusty old coat with only one button, which she kept clutching around herself. Her clothes weren't like other people's, but it didn't seem to bother her. She wore them with an air, as if they were designer jeans. I admired her for that. Most kids, including me, want to dress like everyone else. My mother says she hopes when I'm older I'll branch out, be different, be an individual. I'm not sure I can handle that.

Nell hitched herself closer as the bus swayed and groaned on its way homeward. “We might go out West this summer,” she said in a confiding tone, letting me in on a secret. “One of my uncles has a place out there. He has about fifty horses. He said we could ride 'em any time we want. We're going to get us some of those slanty-heel boots, and I'm going to have a red silk neckerchief, and he promised us all some real cowboy hats.”

“Where's his spread?” I said. I've seen plenty of cowboy movies on TV, and that's what they call it: a spread. For a second, Nell rolled her tongue around inside her mouth in a way she had that I would learn meant she was stalling for time, searching for an answer, not necessarily a truthful one.

“I'm not exactly sure,” she said impatiently. “Out West, like I said.”

“Out West is pretty big,” I said. “How come I never see your mother around your place?” I'd been wanting to ask her that for some time.

“How come I never see yours?” she shot back.

“I told you. She's in Africa. She'll be back next week.”

“Then I guess your daddy's girl friend will make herself scarce, huh?” she said.

“You don't care what you say, do you?”

“I don't blame your ma for taking off.” She changed subjects. “I imagine she couldn't take it around here for long. If I lived in a poky old place like this here, I'd go nuts.” She crossed her legs and rearranged her coat. “If I lived in any place forever and ever, I'd go beserk. Nothing ever happens here, does it?”

I scoured my brains to think of something that had happened, something exciting, within recent memory, and could think of nothing.

“It's so boring, living in one place your whole life.” She stared at me. I could've sworn her eyes were light in color. But now they looked like dead coals set in her pale face.

“I like it.” I defended my home town. “It's pretty. It's the prettiest town in the state, you know.” The minute I said the words, I was sorry.

“It is?” Nell's voice was high and harsh. “Who said?”

And, because I'd often wondered that myself, I got mad.

“It just is,” I insisted. “Ask anybody.”

“It's nothing but a little old hick town. Why, I bet they pull in the sidewalks when the sun goes down. Nothing to do all day long but count the campers going by,” Nell said in a singsong. “Nothing to hear 'cept the dogs barking. It's the most boring place I ever been. And I been around, believe you me. I been in just about every state in the whole country.”

“Hawaii?” I said, struck by a fit of genius. “Alaska?”

“Well, not them.” She raised her shoulders in a shrug that showed Hawaii and Alaska didn't amount to a hill of beans. “They're Johnny-come-latelies, anyhow. They only been states a little while. But I been everywhere 'cept some of the M's.”

“What're the M's?”

“You know. Mississippi, Minnesota, Michigan. Like that. Whenever we move, we get out the map and study where we're headed, where we're going. There's an awful lot of M's. Maryland, Missouri.”

“And Maine, where you are right this minute.”

“Right. I forgot Maine. I can't wait to get out of here. It's the ends of the earth, if you ask me.”

Plenty of times I've wanted to go places, see things. But at that moment I loved Maine. My heart was suffocated with love for Maine.

“I'm sorry for somebody who keeps moving, always moving, never settling down,” I said, striking back. I knew it was mean, but what she said about Maine, my home state, was mean too. “Folks who keep moving from place to place never make any friends. How do you make friends if you never light somewhere?”

“Friends!” Nell spat out the word. And then she laughed in a cruel way to let me know what she thought of friends. “That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.” She jabbed a fingernail at me. “If you're smart,” she said, “you get along without friends. You learn, kid, to get along on your own. I don't need anybody but me. I got me and the boys and that's it. That way I know who's on my side. With friends, you're liable to get it in the neck. That's how I see it. You can't trust friends. Anyone who counts on friends has to be cuckoo.”

A shiver slid over me like somebody had walked on my grave. I never heard such talk. What if she was right?

“And I'll tell you something else, Miss Smarty.” Nell's voice dipped low and angry in my ear. “I don't wear any pants if I don't want. If I don't feel like it. What do you think about that? Nobody tells me what to do. Nobody.”

“Big deal,” I said scornfully. “If I don't want to wear pants, I don't either. I wear a skirt any time I feel like it.”

Nell's raucous laughter made some kids turn and stare at us. “I don't mean pants pants,” she hissed. “I mean underpants.”

“I don't believe you,” I said when I got hold of my voice.

Slowly, very slowly, in slow motion, she raised her long skirt so I could see she was telling the truth.

I swallowed and said, “Don't you get cold?” as matter-of-factly as possible.

She smoothed her skirt back down, and pulled her rusty old coat around her as if it had been made of ermine, and smiled at me in a way that let me know she had won whatever fight it was we'd had.

10

It was Saturday morning, nine a.m. We were in Rowena's basement. Rowena's mother stands guard over her house like it was the Tower of London and the crown jewels were hidden under the mattress. Nobody's allowed to sit on the beds, much less the couch. Every piece of furniture is covered in a sea of plastic. There are plastic runners on the rugs too, in case some outa stater with car trouble knocks on the door asking to use the telephone due to car trouble. Maine kids are trained to leave their shoes outside practically before they're toilet-trained, so as not to track in mud and snow. But Rowena's mother believes in being prepared. For anything.

Rowena's father is a traveling salesman and hardly ever home. Which makes it nice for Rowena's mother. That way she has one less person around to louse up her house.

So every time we go to Rowena's, we wind up in the basement, which smells of mildew and cat. Nell Foster sat, wearing her coat, in the big old hairy chair Rowena's cat always had her kittens in. She'd decided to join the Chum Club after all. No one was exactly sure who'd asked her. I know it wasn't me. But there she sat, in the only comfortable chair in the place, saying she'd join. Under certain conditions. She wanted to be chairman of the yard sale and also treasurer.

“Out of the question! Out of the question!” Betty shouted, whirling around like a dervish in full flight. Rowena looked befuddled and pushed her hair off her forehead so she could think better.

Nell sat still, waiting for silence. After the protests died down, she began to speak, so softly we had to lean toward her to hear what she said.