In the Beauty of the Lilies (27 page)

“But Daddy smokes cigarettes. Old Golds.”

“He smokes poison, then. But not this strong. Watch out, girl; I’m squirting. Hold your breath.”

Plumes of foul spray fluffed into the wilt-edged and spotted leaves of the sick geraniums. Essie liked this second grandmother because she never tried to overfeed her or pretend that Essie was sweeter than she was. A tawny strength moved through the shy old lady’s stained fingers. When Essie was with Grandma Wilmot she became soft and frilly, and wanted to eat lots of dessert and be cuddled; when she was with Grandma Sifford she felt harder and older, as if women were partners in a world full of danger and little secrets to know. “Another bug-discourager we used to use down home was garlic,” the old lady said, not raising her voice as if Essie just because she was small was deaf, the way the other grandmother did. “Six or so cloves boiled in a quart of water for twenty-five minutes. But people buy flowers for pretty, they don’t want them smelling of garlic. If a girl eats garlic every day,” she went on, and turned on Essie sharp deep honey-brown eyes that made the child tighten her lips, “she will never catch a cold. But then the boys will never kiss her.”

Essie laughed, and Grandma, covering her gappy mouth quickly with a bent brown hand, laughed too.

The light changed, because Momma was there in the doorway to this back room, frowning. “Mother, you’ll poison her,” she said.

“I told her not to breathe in,” Grandma Sifford said humbly. She never argued with Momma and seemed afraid of her, or at least never to look at her. It was time for Momma to take Essie home and see what Grandma Wilmot had cooked for their supper. The rain was thinner than when it drummed on the greenhouse panes and there was still light left in the day,
though the day in September when the day and night were equal had come and gone and now every day would be a little bit shorter. Toward Christmastime it was dark when she went to school and dark again before Daddy got back from the mail route. “Now how was the movie?” Momma asked.

“It was nice. The girl saved an entire orchestra from not having a job. Momma, I want to l-l-learn how to sing like her.”

“Oh, singing like Deanna Durbin is a God-given talent. Only one in a million can sing like her. Not even that many.”

This hit Essie in the same deep place that the woman’s face crumbling into old age in
Lost Horizon
had. It meant a terrible limit to things, a damp weight pressing down on her. “Why wouldn’t God give it to me, too?”

“God has given you many good things already,” Momma said primly, her body and head dipping in that embarrassing way she had, like there was a hole that kept appearing in the ground.

“What, Momma? Like what?”

Momma smiled. “He has given you a perfect body and a hopeful nature and a lot of nervous energy.”

“That’s all?”

“Some would say that’s a lot, and little girls who want more are being greedy.” It scared and offended Essie, slightly, when her mother talked to her by spacing her words in this solemn careful way, as if teaching her how to talk. Momma softened her tone. “Some day, maybe, if you’ve done well with your dance lessons, we could look into singing lessons, if Daddy can afford it.”

“G-Grandpa can afford it.” This was overstepping.

“Daddy and I don’t want to ask favors of Grandpa. He’s been too good to us already. And Danny will need his lessons,
too, and his education. Anyway, you’re not old enough for singing lessons. You still have your baby voice.”

All this ran counter to the mood Essie had brought out of the movie house, and rather than hear more she began to skip, partly in the excitement of being out in the misty rain without her rubbers and her stiff slicker that smelled so funny and rubbery, and partly in exaggeration of her mother’s limp. She skipped ahead of her and then back on the other side, as if encircling some clumsy animal caught in a lasso.
Baby voice
. She’d show her. “I’m going to go to the movies all alone all the time from now on. I loved it without you and Daddy there.”

“Oh my,” Mother said, slowing and seeming to exaggerate her limp herself. “Such ambition. Such
pep
.”

In reconciliation Essie took her mother’s hand, pretty and white and perfect and moist, and stopped skipping. There was no car in sight either way but she had been told to be careful crossing Locust Street and always was. Daddy was still out in the yard, finishing up, carrying a wheelbarrow-load of weeds and dead peony stalks away to the heap next to the fence, behind the wire trash cage where he burnt newspapers and Ritz-cracker boxes and envelopes that had been slit open. His little red fire was smoking blue in the rain. The kitchen lights were on, and Ama’s hunched shape flitted past, on her way to the stove holding a pot, taking tiny hurried steps because it was hot. The set-back gray house, with her father in the yard and her grandmother in the kitchen, and Mr. Bear upstairs waiting on her bed, where the day’s light was leaking away above the spines of the radiator with their secret pattern of twisting ivy, struck Essie suddenly as sad, and insubstantial, a ghost house, seen by the light of the silvery movie world whose beautiful smooth people rattled all those words at each
other and moved through their enormous ceilingless rooms with such swiftness and electric purpose. The day was still Saturday, every day lasted and lasted, and tonight if she begged she could stay up to eight and hear Professor Quiz, though sometimes Daddy wanted to hear Ed Wynn at the same time. He made him laugh, he said, and forget the world’s misery, and this seemed sad, too, and shabby, like the places at the corners where the kitchen tablecloth was wearing through so the shiny checked pattern flaked away to reveal the tan burlappy cloth under the shiny layer. Black came off on your finger when you touched the oil-stove grates, and the wooden icebox held a great crazed whitish block sweatily melting in its belly, getting smaller and smaller on the metal slats. Essie saw her home by a light as if from above the clouds and realized that at some incredible time in the future she would leave it here on Locust Street like a seventeen-year-locust husk she found this summer still clinging with no bug inside it to the trunk of a little crabapple tree she was thinking of climbing.

The war was horrible, all those young soldiers being killed and babies being bombed and the Nazis murdering a whole village at Lidice and everything, but wonderful, too, happening so far away, in so many of what they called “theatres,” and making all the movie stars go about selling bonds and putting on shows for the troops with the USO. The war gave everybody something to do. Because Lyle Dresham, the young sorting clerk at the post office, was drafted, and old Wes Freeman had retired and then died of a bad liver all by himself in his shack out by the marsh, and Mr. Horley himself was of retirement age but agreed to stay on “for the duration,”
Daddy worked longer hours than ever but only did one delivery a day instead of two. To the rural outskirts, including Beaver Road, he drove a khaki Jeep the Army had lent the post office so the blue-star mothers of Basingstoke would get their V-mail. In town he parked at the corners near the green collection boxes and walked a piece of his walking route and then went back for the Jeep. When he gave Essie a ride in the Jeep it was fun because it bounced at every bump and she felt what it was like to be a soldier. The bottle-cap factory was converted to making bullet casings and Momma got a job there, working through the night when she was on the dead man’s shift. Coming into the house with a blurred happy face with her hair upswept according to factory regulations and wearing brown pants and a blue working shirt like a man, she would kiss Essie as the child was heading out the door to school. At the age of thirteen Essie was in the seventh grade and that meant walking the opposite way from the elementary school on East Rodney Street. It meant walking west to the combination junior-high–senior-high building built on the edge of the old poor farm in 1923, with the football field inside the cinder track and just beyond the bleachers fields of the new crop called soybeans, since there were fewer hogs now in the countryside to feed field corn to.

The high school had been built of bricks the color of throw-up, rude kids said. Separate from the big building stood a wooden shed roofed in tarpaper where the groundskeepers kept their lawn mowers and the athletic department kept the girls’ hockey sticks and the square stuffed baseball bases and five-sided home plates. There were two baseball diamonds, one for softball not far from the storage shed, so that a good long foul ball pulled over third base might hit the wall or its one window covered in rat wire, and another beyond
it, with a grass infield, for hardball—high-school varsity and also the town league. Beyond this second diamond the town playground offered an open pavilion with a smaller equipment shed and tables for checkers and braiding gimp, a basketball backboard on two pipes stuck in cement, two metal slides kept slippery and shiny by rubbing with the wax paper that sandwiches were wrapped in, a swing set with four big troughs worn where feet kicked, a smaller set of three for babies with chairs that had a bar across in front, and a jungle gym whose iron pipes were dewy and cold in the morning on the backs of your knees when you skinned the cat. Nobody could skin the cat like Essie at the age of ten; she liked the feeling of the world turning upside-down and the blood rushing to her head and her dress falling down over her underpants for a second. By the time she was thirteen she would never do such a thing, boys might see her hair there, at the edge of the cotton crotch. Much of the playground apparatus had become babyish but still she liked to linger, as spring lengthened the days, in the barren area between the shack near the high school and the pavilion on the edge of the old poorhouse peach orchards, a stretch that included the bleachers for the two baseball diamonds. The space held a flavor of after-school release, of a wide horizon, of not hurrying to get home. Extending her range to this space was a step, she knew, in her life’s adventure. It was lazy and dirty and expectant, the atmosphere of it, the dirt full of stamped-in cigarette butts and drinking straws and used bottle caps, the back of the pavilion shed scratched with drawings and words not all of which she as yet understood.

She liked the kids who hung out here, though they were from the wrong side of town. As they lounged on the bleachers the air felt like rain clouds, hanging low and fuzzy over
their heads, making them momentarily safe from possible bombers in the sky. The Du Pont plants and the Canal might be enemy targets, everybody said. Battles were raging in every direction over the horizon, in Libya and Burma, at Guadalcanal and Stalingrad, names in big black headlines and breathless radio bulletins introduced by the stutter of a telegraph key. In the movie newsreels, tanks plowed through the desert, making sandstorms, and Allied planes dropped hundreds of slowly twirling finned bombs on German cities, making firestorms. Smoke billowing, planes diving, battleships listing and sinking, parachutes multiplying in the sky over Yugoslavia like lilies in water, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto starving and fighting guns with stones, frozen Nazi soldiers’ bodies lying all over Russia: the voice of God behind the movie newsreels boomed and scolded, swollen graver and greater than ever in this feast of horror yet enclosing the audience in the ultimate security of an unfaltering American baritone. Essie did not doubt that the Germans and Japanese would be rolled back and crushed like evil bugs. Just their names, Huns and Japs, were buglike. The Italians were already surrendering, a forest of arms in the air, all of these wops looking so scruffy, unshaven, scared. Hitler was ridiculous and chewed carpets when he got mad and Hirohito was a tiny yellow man in a bulky big white uniform with a foolish big sword. Mr. Phillips said in Sunday school it was like Armageddon in Revelation in the Bible, all these beasts up from the bottomless pit, led by the one who spake like a dragon and put a mark on everybody’s forehead or hand, whose name was the number 666, which worked out exactly to be code for
HITLER
, he said. Essie was impressed but not worried; Roosevelt and God and Churchill and Stalin were encircling and protecting her with millions of brave young men, GI Joes.
She was to be confirmed into the church this June, and Ama was busy working on the dress, with overlapping tulle skirts below and a breathtaking bodice of a fabric full of little eyelets up above.

Yet all the houses along the Delaware shore were blacked out and at night when the firehouse siren blew you were supposed to turn off all your lights and huddle on the stairs just as if that fat Goering’s Luftwaffe bombers might be rumbling overhead. One night some planes did go over and Essie’s heart nearly stopped, but for Ama giving her a hug and Daddy breathing the one word, “Ours.” Ama sewed and knit things for the troops overseas and was always collecting canned food and old clothes for the children of Britain. To buy canned food now, along with sugar and coffee, you needed coupons, and got little round red rationing buttons in change, as well as the real change in pennies and nickels and dimes, at Hubie Drew’s grocery store. Shoes were that way too, which Essie didn’t mind because she loved to go barefoot from April to October; the soles of her feet got so tough and thick she could stick safety pins through them and horrify Danny, who couldn’t stand to see it. Lucky Strike green had gone to war and Daddy paid her a penny a cigarette for rolling them out of tobacco and ZigZag paper in a little machine that you flipped back and forth once. The war sucked everything out of their peaceful world: butter and meat, sliced bread and Christmas cards, sneakers and gasoline. Daddy could get gasoline for his Jeep only because he was special as a mailman. Danny was the one who really loved the war, always making that “r-r-r-r-r-r” divebombing noise with his little lead P-38s and B-29s and Spitfires and collecting the insignia of all the Army divisions and jumping with a Geronimo shout on tin cans to flatten them for the scrap drives at school. He was in
the fourth grade, and got sergeant’s stripes for bringing in so many pounds and such a big ball of tinfoil. At night she could hear him in his room fantasizing or maybe even dreaming in his sleep making that “k-k-k-k-k” noise of a machine gun. He was always telling her ridiculous stories he picked up at school about how the Marines in the Pacific would take the little Japanese by the heels and drop them from the backs of battleships one by one into the churning propellers, and how Hitler had only one ball and was turning all the Jews in Europe into soap and smoke. She would tell him, “Cool down, little man; you’re overheating your gaskets,” which was an expression she had picked up from the gang she hung out with out near the playground. They were not considered “nice” but they seemed nice to Essie, nice in that they were letting her in on things she couldn’t learn at home. They were a little tough but these were tough times, with everybody’s parents distracted by the war.