Love Me Tender (12 page)

“This one will do the same thing.”

“Maybe you'll have a fourth,” the grandmother said teasingly.

“Kids are a lot less fun as they get older,” Mel said. “In fact, they're a pain in the butt. Elvira's pierced ear would be the perfect example.”

I started to wish I hadn't listened in. I felt a little sick, even. Although my ear could have made me feel that way, or the aspirin. Probably three aspirin hadn't been such a good idea.

I turned to finish the sandwiches, but the grandmother stopped me with her next remark: “You hate them. The holes in her ear, I mean.”

“I hate them. And Tony's going to hate them. Worse, he's going to get upset all over again every time he looks at her. We didn't need this right now.”

My ear started to throb like crazy. It hurt so much, I thought I might be sick. Sweat pricked out all over me.

“Don't ever make my mistake,” the grandmother said. “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

“Oh,” Mel said on a drawn-out sigh. “Momma.”

“Don't get all soggy on me now.”

I hurried over to the table, wanting to get finished so I could just sit down. I slapped the sandwiches together, put them on paper plates, and stacked these to carry them out-side. By then the conversation had shifted to the problem of snails in the garden.

Chapter 21

THERE WERE three big wooden chairs set up on a little patio below the kitchen window. I said a silent hurrah for Aunt Clare. If she had stayed, she'd have taken the third chair. Kerrie and I would have had to sit in the grass, where we'd no doubt pick up bug bites and would have to spend half the night scratching.

Mel said, “Are you feeling all right, Elvira?”

“Hungry.” Lie, lie, lie.

“You're awfully pale.”

The grandmother said, “You'd be pale too, if you had three stab wounds.”

Mel laughed out loud. “Momma!”

I managed to add to the lie with a halfhearted grin. I admit it, I wanted to impress upon the grandmother that I was a strong girl, even without ballet. At least I wanted to start winning her over, if such a thing was possible. I wanted her to look at me.

Neither one of them looked at me. They took bites of their sandwiches, admiring the clematis vine that had taken over another lawn chair, blooming in wine and deep purple.

The paint had mostly peeled off that chair, so I figured it had been a flower chair for a few summers. It was the kind of thing that looked great to me, but Daddy's customers liked a more polished look.

I put the ice up against my ear between bites. I thought I might be feeling a little bit better. Except when I thought about Daddy. It seemed like a good idea not to think about him while I was eating.

Instead, I remembered every one of Daddy's lady customers having hoop earrings or tasteful little diamond studs. Like gardens and pierced ears went together. Probably my memory was desperate to make excuses for me.

After a little more talk of snails in the garden, Mel said, “Maybe you don't need to think of selling, Momma; just hire someone to help you around the house. You've lived here since you were Kerrie's age.”

“That's probably long enough, then.”

I said, “I read somewhere that it's hard on older people to move to someplace new. They lose track of things, get up at night and don't remember where they are, stuff like that.”

The grandmother turned a flat stare on me. “That's how you see me? As older people?”

“Older than me,” I muttered, and went back to looking at the garden. So much for winning over the grandmother.

“You see?” the grandmother said. “I'm old.”

“Momma.”

“I'm old enough to be called an older person by my first grandbaby.”

“I think that's what grandchildren are supposed to think of their grandparents. For heaven's sake, Momma, the kids think
I'm
old.”

I deliberately did a wide-eyed glance-over, as if the information that Mel might not be ancient came as a real shocker. Mel was not in the least bugged; she stuck her lunchy tongue out at me.

“Gross.”

The grandmother ignored all of this and said, “Your sister is afraid of getting stuck with the care of me.”

“I'm not convinced you need that kind of care,” Mel said.

“Then Clare has already talked to you. What did she say exactly?”

“Momma, Clare loves you—”

“I'm taking our plates inside,” I said, and I did. Some things are for listening in on, and some things are meant to be private.

I got more ice for the washcloth.

I felt tight all over, the kind of tight that a shower sometimes helps. I couldn't wash my hair, but I wanted to stand under the hot water till I felt like I was melting.

I did that and then washed my hair. Very carefully, holding my head so wet hair wouldn't catch on the earrings. I stood under the hot water some more.

I'd started to worry about what if we got lucky and Daddy did come home? How mad would he be? I thought I might have to buy something tentlike to wear for the next school year to make up for it.

But I also hoped I was going to like the hoops more later, because so far they felt like a mistake. I hoped they would turn out to be cool.

As I came out of the bathroom, the grandmother was near the bottom of the staircase. I heard her saying, “I put them in the attic years ago. Which reminds me, we ought to go up there and look for that crib.”

I stopped to listen.

“It's too hot for that today, Momma.”

“Nonsense. If you faint, we'll simply carry you down-stairs and put a cold cloth on your head.”

“Give me a minute,” Mel said, code for “I have to use the bathroom again.”

The grandmother came up the stairs. It made her a little breathless, but she looked like she was the thing she admired: strong. She said, “Are you feeling up to a scavenger hunt?”

I nodded.

The attic stairs were behind what I thought was a closet door. The space was wide, like a regular stairway. Going into the attic felt like going into an oven, but neither one of us fainted.

“It's been taken apart,” the grandmother said. “So we're watching for the ends, painted yellow. And the side rails. That's how we'll spot it.” She walked one side of the attic and I walked the other, holding the washcloth to my ear, letting it drip cool water onto my shoulder.

Although my ear still throbbed, I had gotten used to it in a weird way, and it didn't make me feel like I had to lie down. “Was this Mel's crib when she was a baby?” I asked.

“Yes. Do you mind if I ask why you call your mother Mel?”

“It's what Daddy always called her,” I said. “What he still calls her.”

“Why do you call him Daddy, then?”

“I guess it's what Mel called him,” I said. “So
I'd
know, I mean. Because he didn't always look like himself. But I think I knew anyway.”

“I'm sure children can pick their own daddy out of a crowd of look-alikes.”

Maybe.

Mel came upstairs, saying, “Oh, the afternoons I spent up here. But it's a lot more crowded now.” She picked up a super dusty lamp shade at the top of the stairs and set it aside. “You are allowed to throw things out, Momma.”

“Now don't scold,” the grandmother said. “Sometimes I'm just holding on to something till I make up my mind. Then I get busy with something else and forget it. Other things, though, I just hate to toss away.”

“It's awfully hot up here,” Mel said, sitting down on a box to catch her breath. “We don't want Elvira to have to carry us out of here.”

The grandmother said, “There's an echo of Clare up here.” She opened a trunk full of old clothes and more quilts.

“Oh, I remember that,” Mel said, looking at something in there.

I went to a shelf with some old metal toys, most of them broken, but curiosities all the same. There was a box labeled BOOKS at my feet, and I went through that. They looked like small encyclopedias, but when I opened them, I found they were medical books.

“Who did these belong to?”

“Your grandfather,” the grandmother said, coming over to look at the one in my lap. “He worked for a year to be able to buy that set. He couldn't take me anywhere but for walks. He wanted to be a doctor back then.”

“What happened?”

“We got married, and then your mother came along soon after. But he kept reading those books, his whole life long.”

“Do you think he was disappointed he never got to be a doctor?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “He was proud of his daughters.”

“Oh, Momma!” Mel sat back, dragging a long swath of white something into her lap. “Is this your christening dress?”

“I am old, Melisande, but I am not that old. That would likely be your great-grandmother's christening dress. Possibly my mother's as well.”

“Could I use it for this baby?”

“Why, of course,” the grandmother said. The grandmother went back toward Mel. I stayed where I was, cool cloth pressed to the side of my face, looking at a long list of ailments.

“Oh, looky there. The crib is behind all that mess of dining room furniture I replaced when you and Clare were girls. So dark and heavy, this stuff. Like a lingering illness.”

“Momma!” Mel peered into the shadowy space. “To anybody else's eyes, these are antiques.”

“Elvira, child, help me here?” the grandmother asked. “I don't want your mother lifting things.”

“Leave it till Clare can help her, Momma,” Mel said.

“We'll just get it out here where we can see it.”

“I've sidetracked us,” Mel said. “You wanted to get that window painted.”

“Tomorrow's another day,” the grandmother said.

“Be careful, though, won't you?” Mel said. But she had already opened another trunk. “Oh, Momma. White cotton nightgowns. Would you look at all these tiny pleats? Can I take some of these?” Mel said. She began to rum-mage through that trunk of old white cotton things.

“Whatever you like.”

Together, the grandmother and I moved the old furniture out of the way and carried the crib to the stairs, piece by piece, some wood, some metal. The pieces were surprisingly heavy, but we both pretended otherwise.

We stood back from the crib, wreathed in dust, a little breathless but happy to admire it. An old-fashioned picture of a fawn had been painted on each end.

“Look at that, hand-painted,” Mel said, letting things fall back into the trunk. The grandmother reached out to help her get up. “It's beautiful, Momma.”

But the grandmother said, “What's that I smell?”

We all sniffed.

“My lands, I've set the house afire again,” she said, starting down the stairs at a run.

Chapter 22

I WAS right behind her, leaving Mel to bring up the rear, and I for one thought the grandmother was right. There was a definite smell of smoke as we headed for the first floor. And a kind of haze in the air in the kitchen; I could see it as we raced along the hall.

“Oh!” the grandmother cried, momentarily putting her hands up like she was being robbed. She hurried to the stove and turned off the fire under the teapot.

On the stove, the water had boiled away and the pot melted down—and more or less collapsed in on itself, was my best guess. The top was still the silvery pot color and shaped like a Hershey's Kiss, but the lower half of it was so hot it glowed red like a burning coal.

“Wow,” I said.

“I put on a little water to make more iced tea while I was down here,” Mel said, coming to a panting halt. “I thought we'd find that crib and come right back downstairs.”

“It's not all that serious,” the grandmother said. “Nothing's caught fire.”

Mel said, “Why did you think it was your fault, Momma? You didn't leave anything on the stove.”

“I thought maybe I did and forgot about it.”

“If you had, Momma, it would only mean you got distracted like I did,” Mel said.

“Out of sight, out of mind, as my mother used to say,” the grandmother said.

“Come away from it. We can't do anything about it until it cools, anyway,” Mel said, her paranoia about cooking appliances coming to the fore. “I don't think we ought to stand anywhere near it, in case it explodes or something.”

“I'm sure I have a jar of instant iced tea in the pantry,” the grandmother said. “Let's stir some up and sit outside.”

An hour later, the Kiss no longer glowed red. The kitchen was still hazy with smoke. The grandmother said, “We ought to start up the exhaust fan in the attic. I wish I'd thought of it earlier.”

Mel got a wooden spoon to take a gingerly poke at the Kiss. “It's welded onto the burner,” she said. “And the burner is stuck to the stove.”

“Let's find out if it's cool,” the grandmother said. She put her fingers under the water tap and flung a few drops against the melted pot—they sizzled and dried away.

Mel said, “Momma! Don't make it mad,” and made us all laugh.

The grandmother grabbed it with pot holders, but she couldn't jiggle the thing and said, “It's a permanent fixture.”

Mel had looked under the sink and found a hammer. “Stand back,” she said, and came at the Kiss swinging. She banged on it three or four times, knocking it every which way, but the Kiss didn't budge.

The noise rang through the room. I felt like I ought to be the one doing this, but from the first hit, my head started to hurt something awful.

The grandmother stepped in, saying to Mel, “Give that to me. You shouldn't be doing that in your condition.” She gave the pot one good whack. There was a shriek of metal and suddenly the Kiss shot across the kitchen, hit the wall, and landed on a countertop, pretty as you please.

“My lands,” the grandmother said, running her hand over the dent in the wall. “Did you see that thing go?”

“Look,” I said. “Some of the pot stuck to the burner.” I reached out to touch the slivers and drew back quickly to suck on my finger. “Sharp,” I warned.

“I guess so,” Mel said, inspecting the burner carefully. “Sword Making 101, Momma. Our Viking forebears would be proud of us.”

The grandmother did seem strangely pleased, as if she hadn't realized Mel was kidding. “A few more whacks with the hammer ought to break those pieces off,” she said. “Help Elvira put a Band-Aid on that cut. You'll find them in the medicine cabinet back there.”

And with that, the grandmother raised the hammer and whacked away at that burner, still firmly attached to the stovetop. I ran for the bathroom, eager to get out of the way of flying stove burners. To say nothing of how badly I needed more aspirin.

That's when we heard the all-too-familiar “Yoooo-hoo.”

The grandmother ceased whacking.

Kerrie came in the door first, trying to slurp something bright green through a straw, and spotted the grandmother with the hammer. She halted, wide-eyed, making Aunt Clare practically fall over her.

The momentary silence was followed by a shrill “What in the world? Momma, what have you done?”

I said, “Mel let a pot boil dry.”

“What is that?” Aunt Clare pointed to the silver lump on the counter.

“That's the pot,” Mel said.

Aunt Clare finished a slow inspection of the premises and, in some way, of us. We each of us glanced around as she did this, but it seemed wrong to laugh; there was no chance of Aunt Clare finding anything funny in this.

“You all look so untidy,” Aunt Clare said finally, and settled her glance on me. “Is that blood? Are you bleeding?”

I said, “It's just a little cut.” A drop of blood fell on the floor.

“What have you all been up to? Apart from rendering the cooking pots unrecognizable, that is.”

“We found a crib for the baby,” the grandmother said.

Mel added, “In the attic. There's a christening dress too.”

“I see,” Aunt Clare said, much as if we'd spent the last hours lolling in the recliner while she built a new shopping mall with toothpicks and a hot-glue gun. She moved to set two department store shopping bags on the table in the alcove.

Mel eyeballed Kerrie. “What is that you're drinking?”

Kerrie shrugged as Mel moved toward her, and held the bottle out to be taken away.

Aunt Clare said, “She declared a thirst emergency on the way home.”

Mel said, “This is one of those workout drinks. It's loaded with caffeine.”

“I don't know,” Aunt Clare said, taking the bottle in hand. “Is it? It's green. I figured it for some kind of soda.”

“Clare, didn't you even look?”

“No, I did not. Don't make it sound like I tried to poison the child, Melisande. It's only caffeine.”

Mel handed the bottle to me. “Pour it down the toilet, Elvira.”

Aunt Clare looked at the grandmother and said, “Do you hear how she talks to me?”

“I'm just grateful the straw was too short for the bottle,” Mel said. “If she drank it all, she'd probably go off like a rocket.”

On my way to the bathroom, I could follow the grandmother's efforts to referee. “Don't appeal to me like you're four years old, either one of you,” she said. “You are both grown girls. Don't hope for me to take sides later, when you get me alone. I'm an old woman who needs her peace and quiet.”

Aunt Clare said, “Thank you, Momma, for making us feel like you're caught between a black widow spider and a tarantula.”

“Don't expect to pick a fight with me either,” the grandmother said. “I'll send you both home to your house, Clare. I'll let the grandchildren stay here where there is not a war going on, of course.”

Once in the bathroom, I could hear their voices, but not clearly enough to follow the continuing battle. I was thinking, as I poured the green rocket fuel down the toilet, the grandmother knew her stuff. If family fights had loose corners, she pretty much nailed them all down.

“Don't flush, I'm going to tinkle,” Kerrie said as she came into the bathroom.

“It might be dangerous to tinkle on caffeine,” I said, in no mood to put up with any little-sister crap, even if this little sister wasn't yet guilty of any major offenses today.

“Then I'll pee on it,” she said. “What's all the fuss about? Mel lets me have caffeine.”

I held up the bottle. “Not half a gallon at a time.”

“Sixteen ounces is not half a gallon,” Kerrie said, but since she didn't take this point any further, I figured she wasn't all that sure. I got a Band-Aid, but no aspirin.

Kerrie said, “Here, I'll put it on for you.”

“I got it.” I shut the medicine chest and leaned my fore-head against the mirror while I let the tap water run over the cut. “I'm beginning to understand why Mel stayed away from home all these years.”

“Her mother?” Kerrie asked.

“Her sister.”

“Is it about the dog?” Kerrie slid into the baby voice. “I miss Hound. I need a dog so much.”

“It's just us here,” I said, feeling suddenly like I just wanted to go to bed and maybe not get up again until tomorrow morning. “Stop talking like such a baby.”

“Pregnancy is easy for you,” she said in a surprising switch to her big-girl voice. The voice that drives me crazy. “You got Daddy.”

“What do you mean?” But I knew what she meant. I really did.

Maybe it wasn't about favorites exactly, the way Aunt Clare thought, but I played guitar with Daddy, Mel took Kerrie to gymnastics. Daddy quizzed me when I had a big test coming up, Mel kept an eye on Kerrie's homework.

It probably started when Kerrie was a baby and Daddy took charge of getting me across the street safely. He took me out when the baby was napping. Pretty soon, when Daddy went out to a flea market, or even to kick tires, he let me go along.

And that was fine with me. Because shopping for a car was interesting. A person took a drive. It was all about getting the best mileage and looking at leather interiors. I didn't want to stand around while Mel tried on twenty outfits and worried if her butt was too big.

“I'm not the baby anymore. I'm stuck in the middle now,” Kerrie said, dropping the big-girl voice as well as the baby act. For the moment she was just herself, which might have been why I suddenly felt like talking to her.

“You aren't the only one with this problem, you know,” I said. “American families have two point five children.” I wasn't sure where I'd heard this. “There are plenty of families with middle kids.”

“Yeah, we're the invisible ones.” She'd heard a few news reports herself. “The point five, most likely.”

“I'll share Daddy with you.”

“Thanks, but I don't like flea markets all that much,” Kerrie said. “And I don't want to help weed our garden.”

I was sort of glad she had turned down this offer. I liked it that I got Daddy. Even if it meant that Mel and Kerrie didn't want him all that much sometimes.

Kerrie said, “I want that dog, and I want you to want her too.”

At just that moment, Aunt Clare went rapidly past the bathroom on her way out and let the screen door slam behind her.