Durable Goods (7 page)

I fold up my pajama bottoms into a neat square. My mother gave them to me. They are too small, but I am running out of things she touched to put next to me. I slide under my bed, lay the pajamas across my chest, close my eyes. “I hate you,” I say. “Look what you are missing.”

Her, on a half-circle kind of throne, little gold five-pointed stars floating around her head. She is wearing something blue that does not show the outline of her body. She glows. And she says back through healthy pink lips, “I miss you, too.”

She used to tell me, when I went to bed at night, that I should hurry and fall asleep. That way, the fairies would come and paint stars on my ceiling faster. I wanted to see them. It irritated me that I had to be asleep before they came. But it did teach me one good thing: just stop looking, and the magic will come.

I opened my eyes. “Where are you? Is that heaven?”

Nothing.

I slide out from under my bed, put my pajamas in the hamper. I stand by my window and look out at the dark parade ground. It has a fierce presence, even empty.

Cherylanne is at the movies with Bill O’Connell. Diane is with Dickie. I have started my period and I am alone. I put a wide blue ribbon I saved from a birthday present into my hair. I climb into bed with a book. I lay my hand across my stomach, feel the outline of the belt. Just making sure. It’s always that way with the biggest things: they never feel real. You have to keep on checking them forever.

H
e comes into my room later that night, turns on the light. He is holding my pajama bottoms in his hand.

“Are these yours?”

I swallow, nod. Diane does the laundry. Did she tell him?

He looks around the room, sighs, then looks at me. “You know about this?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“School.”

“All right.” He starts to leave the room, then turns back. “You soak bloody things in cold water. I guess they didn’t tell you that, huh?”

“No.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“All right.” He turns out the light. I hear his steps going downstairs.

Here is the thing: other ways are unfamiliar and, in a way, they only hurt. A month ago, when his father died, he burst into my room, stood still for a moment, then said, “Your grandpa died.”

“Oh,” I said. My grandfather held himself unto himself. I never sat on his lap. He never smiled. When I saw him, he would ask how old I was, and I would tell him; and he would shake his head, as
though he were a little angry. That would be our conversation. He would lean forward onto his cane, groan a little, adjust his upper half, then settle back into himself, staring straight ahead. I didn’t love that grandfather. And the fact of his dying made no difference to me. But I knew I needed to react and so I made myself cry. I put my hands over my face and thought of a book I’d read recently where the dog died. I was sitting at my desk and my father came over to me, pressed my head into his stomach. I cried for him until he was finished with something deep and private inside. Then he left my room. I felt a terrible relief. I stood up and shivered, like I was shaking things off me.

It is better when he doesn’t touch. We are used to it. Mostly when he offers you a kindness, you only feel bad, wondering how to hold yourself, how to be now. And wondering, too, about the other times.

I
n the morning, I forget for a minute about my miracle. But then, when I go into the bathroom, I remember and suck in air, happy-quick. I run back to bed, lie still with my eyes closed. I can get pregnant. I can have something its own self, and yet part of me, growing inside. Cells of all kinds, serious and dividing. Hair sprouting underwater. Fingers, and fingernails coming. An ear on each side of a new head, eyelids, moving legs and arms. This is too much! Why can I be pregnant already? At some time it must have made sense. At some time you were not in junior high at this age, but ready to be making your own dinner and rocking your babies to sleep.

I get up, pour cereal into a bowl, turn on the television to a low volume. I like Saturday-morning television: the drama of Fury and Sky King; the jerk-back kind of watching you do when the Three Stooges are on. I also like Popeye, though why Olive Oyl chooses him over Bluto I do not understand. Those misshapen arms. Never mind that after some spinach they can become helpful things, like mallets. The rest of the time you have to look at them,
and the tattoos do not help one bit. Bluto is better looking. His character is a little rough, but I believe that in the long run Olive would be better off with him.

Once I told some GIs that Cherylanne and I watched Popeye. We were at the PX looking at records and they asked us which ones were the most popular. I said we didn’t know. “Don’t you watch
American Bandstand?”
one of them asked. He was grinning, flirting a little.

“We like Popeye better,” I said.

Cherylanne gasped slightly, then stormed out of the record area into Young Juniors. “Don’t you ever tell anyone that again!”

“Why not? We do like Popeye better.”

I saw her face change around with the beginnings of a few answers to me, but she didn’t pick any. She just walked away, left me fingering some pleated skirts. I didn’t understand how those skirts were made, how they kept those permanent dents. I looked at them for a while, on the outside and on the inside, stretched them in and out like an accordion, and then I went home.

That was the end of Cherylanne watching cartoons
with me. It made me kind of sad, because I thought she still wanted to. There were these forces. They would grab her like canes grabbed cartoon dancers around the neck and pulled them off the stage. “This can be a very difficult time of life,” Cherylanne recently said. She was using her big lavender powder puff to perfume between her breasts. “Adolescence is studied by many famous people because it is so hard.” She sighed deeply, then noticed a chunk of mascara loose on one upper lash. She picked at it, holding her face perfect, until she got it.

Then she started in with some lipstick. She stretched her mouth open, talked funny through it while she smeared on a creamy layer of Rose Petal Pink. “There are pamphlets at the guidance counselor’s if you want to read them,” she said. She closed her mouth, rubbed her lips together, looked at me. “If you want to know what you’re in for when you’re my age, I mean.” And then, generous, “Some are right for you even now.” She smacked her lips together hard, checked the mirror, stopped a smile just short of itself.

A
fter breakfast, I go over to Cherylanne’s. It is ten-thirty. My father and Diane are still sleeping. It’s good when this happens. I like to run the day for a while.

No one answers when I call out. I stand for a while in the living room, then move into the kitchen, pretending I live there. I open the refrigerator door, sit at the kitchen table. It doesn’t work. The smell is not right. Your own house always has the right smell to you, the one that quiets a nervous place, no matter what. I hook my feet around the rungs of the chair, look around, then hear the low sweet sound of voices being carried on the air outside. Belle and Cherylanne. I get up and look into the backyard. Belle is hanging out sheets. She carries them, huge and fragrant, in a creaking wicker basket, clothespins in a faded striped bag. When the sheets are on the clothesline, they make an inviting
U
shape. I always want to lie in that damp bed, be rocked by the wind and look up at the clouds.

I used to stay near my mother when she hung out clothes. I made people out of the straight wooden
clothespins, the ones with rounded heads. I didn’t like the spring-type ones, which could surprise you with their meanness. I took the round ones, wrapped them in Kleenex for clothes, and made families: two parents, many children, clipped all in a row on the edge of the basket high above the other clothespins, which lay naked and unchosen below them. I used to help peg things on the line. I liked the slight resistance you felt, the satisfying muffled
squeak
of wood anchoring cloth. And I liked the clothespins’ dependability. Say you used them to hang out some towels and then forgot about them: you could come back in three days and there they would be, just as you’d left them, still holding something up, even though days had passed and it had been dark, even though you had sat at the table eating your second dessert, with those clothespins a million miles from your mind. They kept on working until you said they were done.

Our laundry goes in a dryer now. He doesn’t like hanging out clothes. Sometimes it catches up to me in a rush, all that has changed.

Cherylanne is lying on a beach towel near
Belle, sunning herself. She has an alarm clock beside her—timed, I know, to go off every twenty minutes to remind her to flip over—and a fat new magazine wrapped around itself to hold its place. I want to know what she and Belle are saying but I can’t quite hear. Whatever it is, it is a warm and friendly thing. I have known it. My mother and I, walking to the grocery store together: I had a sunburn and was wearing my mother’s Mexican kind of blouse with the stretchy neckline pulled down like a gypsy, to spare my blistered shoulders. You could see fluid move inside the blisters like little oceans if you touched them. I carried an umbrella to shade myself. I felt glamorous, like someone a little bit famous. My mother told me about when she had to get glasses, when she was my age. “Oh, they were so ugly,” she said. “Not like the cute ones they have now. They looked just like Coke bottle bottoms, and the frames were ugly gray metal. All the kids made fun of me.”

“Even your brother and sister?” I asked.

She smiled. “Especially them.”

“What did you do?”

She stared ahead, remembering, “Well, I cried, of course. And I hardly ever wore them. I tried to get by without them.”

“Oh.” I took her hand, held it for a while, turned the wedding ring on it around and around. Then I said, “I think you look pretty in glasses.”

“Thank you,” she said, but she was out of the moment and on to her list. “Baked potatoes or mashed tonight?” She stopped walking, leaned close to me. “Or
scalloped?”
she asked, a little excited. “How would you like that?” It was a whole thing for her, rich and satisfying, planning what we would eat each night. She worked to make things match. She clipped recipes constantly, filed them in scented envelopes, used them like friends.

I
come out the back door and wave to Belle. “Hey, Katie,” she says, and Cherylanne sits up, squints at me.

“Oh, good,” she says. “Put some on my back,
will you?” She holds up the Coppertone bottle. I squeeze some in my hands, rub it on in the way I know she likes. You aren’t supposed to get it on her swimsuit straps. “Want to lie out with me?” she asks.

Well, I don’t. I find it boring, suntanning in the backyard. It’s strictly for tanning emergencies. The only sounds you hear are airplanes droning, army men calling out army things, the cars going by in the distance. Ants can crawl on you whenever they want. When you lie on your back, you get a wet itch all along the middle of it; and when you turn over, you get it on your stomach. I like lying out at the pool, the sound of water keeping you cool even if you aren’t in it.

“Let’s go swimming,” I say.

She looks at her watch. “Can’t. I have an afternoon date.”

I have never heard of such a thing. “What for?”

“I’m going bowling.”

“With who?”

“Bill O’Connell.”

“Again?”

“We haven’t been bowling.”

“I know, but you just saw him last night.”

Cherylanne looks at her mother, then at me. In a low voice, she says, “I
know
that.”

Belle anchors the last towel on the line, pulls the empty basket up to rest on her hip. “You can help me bake,” she says. “I’ve got to make a cake today.”

I shrug. “Okay.” I like helping Belle. Even when I’d never broken an egg before, she just went ahead and let me do it.

“I might mess up,” I had warned her, the shame already curled low in the bottom of my belly.

“Try it,” she said. Her voice was as comfortable as a quilt. I held my breath, cracked the shell against the side of the bowl. The yolk smashed; pieces of shell fell into the bowl with it. I was so sorry, and feeling scared to look up, and all she did was give me a clean bowl and another egg. “Try again,” she said, and walked away. She started humming. Country western was what she really liked.

“But I messed up,” I said.

She stopped singing, came to stand by me. “Do you like scrambled eggs?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you didn’t hardly mess up, then.”

I had to keep my smile tight, so much was in me. And that wasn’t all. Next she said, “You know, if you didn’t like scrambled eggs, you still wouldn’t have messed up. You’re just learning, Katie. That’s all. You go ahead and mess up all you want. Hell, I got a million eggs. They’re on sale over to Piggly Wiggly.”

I didn’t do anything else wrong. I figured I might not. I’d been taught tenderly, and that’s how a lesson stays. I can separate eggs now, one-handed. It’s all Belle’s. It’s so easy to go the other way. One of the reasons I have trouble with math is that the teacher punishes you for being wrong. When you miss too much, he draws a circle on the blackboard just above the level of your nose, and then tells you to put your nose in it. Naturally you have to be on tiptoe to do it. He has you stay there till your leg muscles feel shaky. He divided our class up the third week of school into smart, middle, and dumb groups. All that trouble I have with numbers this year, that’s all Mr. Hornman’s.

So I will help Belle today. When I am done, I will try to think of a way to thank her. You have to
give back. Last time, I gave her a new tin of chili powder with gold Christmas ribbon wrapped around it. Later, I lied to my father when he was looking for it. That was the secret part of my gift. He would have gotten mad if he knew Belle was teaching me things. “Something special about Belle?” he would ask. “Something better?” He’d done things like that before. And of course there were no answers to those questions. None that you could say.