Getting Near to Baby (2 page)

And then she makes like she's in charge of roof-sitting today. “Don't you come any closer. You're likely to fall right off onto the patio and crack your head wide open.”

Little Sister has been inching her way down right alongside me, and then a little bit in front of me, and now she leans forward to get a good view of Aunt Patty screeching up at us. Aunt Patty rewards her with another shrill cry.

I have a handful of Little Sister's nightgown, just in case, but she isn't going anywhere. We've run down hill-sides steeper than this. It does give me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, though, being so close to the edge. Like this roof might roll over like a big dog and heave us into the air like fleas.

“Little Sister,” Aunt Patty calls. Her tone has changed to sweet and wheedling. “Little Sister, you'll listen to reason now, won't you?”

It's no use her appealing to Little Sister, who only listens to me, anyway. Another reason, Little Sister don't talk. She used to. But not now.

L
ittle Sister hasn't said word one since Baby died. At first I tried to make her want to talk. But nearly everything I asked of her could be answered with a shake of her head or a shrug. Then I did things, like tell her I planned to make sugar cookies with refrigerator dough, and I would pretend to forget. But Little Sister didn't want sugar cookies bad enough, I guess.

So I said I needed help counting how many zucchini to pick for our dinner, or counting out how many eggs the chickens laid in one day. Little Sister would stare at me like life was too serious for me to try to trick her into doing something she didn't want to. I kept at her, though, for days on end. Finally Little Sister made up that one finger meant no, two fingers meant yes, a wagging of her flat hand meant maybe. She would hold up both hands, flashing her fingers for every ten of something so she could count up to a hundred if she had to. When she was emphatic, she would flash ten fingers, telling me “NO!” Or ten fingers twice, twenty fingers, for “YES!”

Little Sister hasn't done much of that since getting to Aunt Patty's. It makes Aunt Patty nervous. She's not mean about it, she just takes Little Sister's hands in hers and holds them and keeps talking like she never noticed a thing. Or if somebody is around, she talks louder. She pulls Little Sister's hands close and pushes them down, hoping nobody will notice.

“What are the girls doing up there?” This is Mrs. Biddle, the neighbor. As sweet an old lady as you could ever hope to meet. Bakes good cookies, the homemade kind, and she's real free with them, too.

“You can see for yourself they've climbed out onto the roof,” Aunt Patty says.

She shouldn't speak to old Mrs. Biddle that way, it could hurt her feelings. But that's Aunt Patty for you. If anybody ever told her she ought to have some respect for her elders, she put it right out of her mind. Little Sister scoots back far enough that Aunt Patty can't see her anymore. Then she waves to Mrs. Biddle.

“She is the sweetest child.” Mrs. Biddle sighs. She is just taken with Little Sister.

“She is the spawn of the devil,” Aunt Patty says clearly, and even though only Little Sister and I were meant to hear, Mrs. Biddle hears her, too.

Little Sister's face is hidden from me by the way the curtain of her hair falls over one shoulder. “She means me, not you,” I whisper to her, just in case.

As sweet as if she were offering a second helping, Mrs. Biddle says, “You don't mean that, Patty.” She makes it seem that Aunt Patty isn't meant to feel bad for saying such a terrible thing, she is only being given a chance to mend her ways. Mrs. Biddle makes me smile.

But not Aunt Patty. She is still glaring up at me hard enough to make me want to pull back up to where she can't see me. Or maybe her face has frozen that way.

“Patty, now you don't mean that,” Mrs. Biddle says, trying again. Mrs. Biddle probably has no idea how riled Aunt Patty can get when things don't go her way, and worse, when she gets the idea she's being criticized for it. “I do,” Aunt Patty says. “I really do. I have only had them for three weeks and they are driving me out of my only mind.”

This takes me by surprise. I thought I was the only one counting the days. Well, me and Little Sister.

Down below, Aunt Patty is going on at Mrs. Biddle in that shrill voice she gets when she is real upset. “How would you like to wake up one morning to Mrs. Garber telling you your nieces are up on the roof about to jump off?” These are fighting words for Aunt Patty. Mrs. Biddle might need me to come down and put a stop to this. “And Mrs. Potts calling first thing in the morning to say there are owls roosting up on my rooftop. Very funny. How would you like that?”

Aunt Patty stamps back into the house.

Mrs. Potts. I might have known. She's such a busybody. Still, she has a fine imagination. I guess that's one good thing about her. I've enjoyed some of the silly gossipy stories she comes up with. But Mrs. Garber. To think I would come up here to jump off, now that is a stretch. Anybody with eyes should be able to see. We have been here at Aunt Patty's for three weeks now, and I have had it up to here with her. All the way up to here.

T
he first thing Aunt Patty did when she got us here to Raleigh was take us shopping for new clothes. “Little outfits” was how she put it, like we were dolls. Mostly striped T-shirts and white cotton blouses was what she had in mind. And what she called camp shorts. Wide legs with narrow cuffs and lots of pockets.

Little Sister and I didn't get to say one thing about what we liked and what we didn't. That is, we couldn't say unless Aunt Patty asked because she paid for everything, and she never asked. Aunt Patty knew what she wanted us to wear.

When she was done, we looked like smaller versions of Aunt Patty, right down to our ugly leather sandals. We came back here and she put all our other clothes into a cardboard box, and I mean everything. She left us standing in our underwear, and under orders to change that. Said much as if she suspected we'd been wearing the same underwear for a week or more. Then she shoved that box with our clothes in it onto a high shelf in a hall closet. And that was that.

“Don't you girls look cute as buttons,” Aunt Patty said when we came out dressed in our new duds.

“Thank you, Aunt Patty,” I said, without so much as a smile. I knew I ought to try to work up some enthusiasm but I have never in my life wanted to be cute as a button. Besides, those sandals were already rubbing a blister on my little toe.

“Don't they look like new pennies, Hob?” Aunt Patty asked.

And Uncle Hob looked up from his newspaper to say, “Like new pennies, yes, I guess they do, dumplin'.”

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.

T
here 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.