My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (6 page)

At the top of the stairs, I found the bedroom that Mr. Cahill had turned into his studio.

His easel and stool were at the front of the room. At the back was an ornate settee, the carved cherrywood worn but the fabric still a beautiful deep burgundy velvet. Another castoff from Mrs. Bentley’s son.

Suddenly, the strong smell of paint and turpentine hit the back of my brain all at once, making my head spin. I stumbled over to the settee and flopped onto it, nearly upsetting a small table.

There I noticed a white bowl filled with fruit about the size of a plum, yet nothing like any fruit I’d seen. Still, my mouth suddenly watered. I hadn’t eaten much that day and I liked the way the pale green and orange fruit looked in the white bowl, the shine of the fruit’s taut skin, and I thought how that color and sheen would be perfect in cloth, a satin or silk, for a soft, flowing dress. Maybe, I thought, Mr. Cahill had shipped this exotic fruit all the way in from Paris, or from somewhere even more exotic, like, say, Persia…and I shouldn’t touch it.

Then I thought that Mr. Cahill wouldn’t mind if I ate one fruit—and then I thought,
Maybe I’m
supposed
to be eating the fruit; maybe he’s trying to get over the shrieking Julia by painting
Young Woman Eating Exotic Persian Fruit on Settee.

Much better than my earlier real-life pose,
Young Woman Choking Down Tasteless Marvel Puffs for Little Brother’s Quest for One Square Inch of Alaska
.

So I picked up a piece of the fruit. I closed my eyes so I could focus on savoring the taste of the fruit, and then eagerly bit into it. A sharp, bitter taste filled my mouth. I yelped and opened my watering eyes, desperately looking for a receptacle into which I could spit the acrid pulp.

Just then, Mr. Cahill came into the studio, saying, “Sorry, that was an important call—”

He stopped talking when he saw my face and burst out laughing. I forced myself to swallow the bite.

Mr. Cahill sat down at his easel and started sketching, staring at me, not even glancing at the paper or the charcoal in his hand, making big, sweeping strokes. My face suddenly burned and I longed for a glass of water to wash away the taste.

“Persimmon,” he said.

I glanced around. Did he want me to fetch a pastel, a paint pot, a pencil?

“The fruit you just tried to eat,” he said.

I glanced down at the fruit. “Persimmon is a color. Orange red. That”—I pointed at the fruit—“that is mostly green.”

“It’s not ripe yet,” Mr. Cahill said.

“I figured that out. I also figure you didn’t get them at the A and P. Or the old Pleasant Valley Orchard.”

He just kept sketching. I wanted to throw the nasty green persimmons at him, like baseballs.

“Well, where did you get them?”

“From my backyard.”

“I was just in your backyard and I didn’t see anything but an ordinary maple.”

Mr. Cahill put his charcoal down with a purposeful snap, like I’d done that morning with my pencil when Will kept asking me questions.

“I was clearing out brush and poison ivy along the back fence and came across a small tree with green fruit,” he said. “At first I thought it was a plum, but then I realized that fall is the wrong time of year for plums. And then I recalled I’d had this fruit before, in Japan.”

Japan! Maybe he’d been a missionary. But no, I couldn’t imagine Mr. Cahill preaching the gospel like Pastor Stebbins every Sunday at Grandma’s church, sin and sorrow and guilt and redemption. Maybe he’d been in Japan as part of the occupation—he looked too young to have been there in the war—and he met a beautiful woman who became his Japanese bride and she took the name Julia for her life here but now she was unhappy, torn from her native land, and they separated and—

“Different variety, of course,” Mr. Cahill said. “American persimmons usually grow farther south.”

He wasn’t going to tell me why he’d been in Japan. Disappointment made me petulant. “Why would anyone want to grow a tree that puts out such terrible fruit?”

He looked amused. “Ancient Grecians called persimmons the fruit of the gods.”

I thought,
He’s going to fire me on day one if I say more
. But I couldn’t stop. I said, “Pastor Stebbins would say no wonder the fruit’s so bitter, coming from heathens.”

“Then your Pastor Stebbins must not know that once the fruit ripens, it becomes a beautiful red-orange, sweet and
tender. It just has to go through the first frost. I’m doing a series of pastels of persimmons—before they’re ripe, and then again when they’re at the peak of ripeness. Just for fun.”

The question popped out of my mouth: “Why can’t we draw something like persimmons in class? Just for fun?”

Mr. Cahill gave me a sharp look and held up his hand. “If you want to talk,” he said, “we can do that, after I’m done with my sketches. But it will be about your designs—and how you should think about that instead of sewing other people’s ideas.”

Suddenly, I was mad. He didn’t know a thing about my life, or what I wanted. “That’s not enough?”

He stood up, walked over to me, took hold of my left cap sleeve and fingered the hem stitching between his thumb and forefinger. His fingertips brushed my arm, and hot redness flared up my chest and neck and face, even though I tried to will it away.

Mr. Cahill stepped back. “You want to be a designer,” he said.

“No, I didn’t say that, I just—”

“You do,” he said. “I remember more clearly now, your sketches. They are pretty good. And this dress, it shows potential.”

He turned and walked back to his easel, sat down, started sketching. “Yes,” he said firmly, “we will be talking about your potential. That will be part of your job. Maybe while you’re cleaning. But not while you’re modeling. So now, turn your head to the left, lift your right arm over the back of the chaise longue—that’s right, but a little farther back—now stop. Stay still. And be quiet!”

A
fter an hour of posing, my neck was stiff and my head heavy. Still, I washed the dishes piled in Mr. Cahill’s sink. Then he insisted I show him my sketches. He demonstrated how to make thick, velvety lines with the side of my pencil to illustrate a heavier fabric, and thin, wispy lines for lighter fabric.

A few minutes after six, I ran down the alley to the back entrance of Dot’s Corner Café. I’d just grabbed my smock—an awful white-and-red-checked cotton print—when Grandma emerged through the dining room’s swinging door. The kitchen hushed. Big Terry, the cook, and Ralph Seward, the dishwasher, stopped their work. Even the hamburgers seemed to sizzle more timidly.

“You’re late. And what on earth are you wearing?” Grandma stared with her judged-and-found-lacking gaze at the cap sleeve that Mr. Cahill had just admired.

“Home-ec project,” I said. The answer was automatic, defensive—a lie.

I was still giddy from the drawing techniques Mr. Cahill had shown me, my mind buzzing with ideas about how to
improve my designs. I had three dollars carefully wrapped in my handkerchief in a corner of my book bag. My only worry, flitting across my mind like a familiar dark moth, was that after my stint at Mr. Cahill’s I hadn’t had a chance to go by our house and check on Will.

But surely he was fine. He’d
seemed
fine after our strange visit with Trusty and MayJune. I wondered what he would think about Mr. Cahill saying I should consider fashion design school. Will—with his crazy desire to visit one measly square inch of Alaska—would probably just shrug his shoulders and say,
Sure, why not?
…

“Donna, I asked you a question!”

I snapped out of my reverie and looked at Grandma. She was shorter than I, and yet even in heels I felt as though she loomed large.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Why are you wearing those ridiculous shoes?”

I thought fast. “Today we modeled what we’d made over the summer for home-ec class.” I held back a smile at
modeled
. I’d definitely modeled….

“In my day, we learned how to make proper items befitting a lady.”

Like fussy little tea towels?
But I just repeated, “Yes, ma’am,” and quickly tied on the ugly smock. I started toward the dining room door, eager to get out of the kitchen, away from Grandma, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm.

“Your heels are going to be as bloody red as those shoes by the end of your shift,” she said with a pleased little smile. I thought,
I don’t care! I made it through the day in these shoes
—high-heeled, cranberry T-straps that had been Mama’s and
that went perfectly with my reconfigured dress—
driving a car, getting a job with my art teacher that will help me get away from Groverton for good, forever, and…

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, again fighting back a smile. Grandma interpreted all my smiles as mockery.

“Those aren’t appropriate shoes for this establishment!” she hissed, a bit of spittle flying from her lips. Big Terry pressed down extra hard on a hamburger patty, making it sizzle. Ralph Seward clinked together the dishes in the sink. Those little tics of sound were Big Terry and Ralph’s way—they never let me call them “Mr.”—of wordlessly expressing their sympathy.

“I should send you home, dock your pay, tell your father—”

Shirley Wyland, the other waitress on duty that night, whisked into the kitchen through the swinging doors. “Mr. and Mrs. Leis are here,” she said. Shirley was old enough to be my mama but had said—out of earshot of Grandma, of course—that I should just call her Shirley, because I was doing a grown-up woman’s work. She grabbed two slices of pecan pie and two cups of coffee and whisked right back out.

Mr. and Mrs. Leis were regulars, and Mrs. Leis always wanted me to wait on them.
Thank you, Mrs. Leis.

“They’ll want the blue plate special,” I said. “What is it tonight?”

“Shit on a shingle,” muttered Big Terry. Even cooks as good as he was had prepared creamed chipped beef on toast in World War II army kitchens, and Grandma never let him forget his service. Jealous that her customers loved Big Terry’s food as much as they loved her pies and cakes—delectably sweet and tender, just the opposite of the bitter person who made them—Grandma insisted that Big Terry’s
least favorite food be offered as the blue plate at least twice a month, just to rile him. He riled her right back by using the crude nickname for the dish.

I grinned as I poured cups of coffee for Mr. and Mrs. Leis, even as Grandma glared at me, and I kept grinning as I carried the Leises’ coffee out into the dining area of Dot’s Corner Café.

On that Friday night in September, most everyone in town was at the Groverton Senior High School football game, so the café’s few customers were the older regulars. I hadn’t been to a football game since Grandma demanded two years ago that I give up being a cheerleader with Babs and start working Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights—the better to keep an eye on me, she’d told Daddy.

I put the cups of coffee down near Grandma’s idea of a centerpiece, a pair of whimsical salt and pepper shakers. Mr. Leis was playing with the ceramic Dutch boy and girl, holding them face-to-face, muttering under his breath. He was in his eighties, but there was something lost and young in his expression as he played with the figurines costumed in native dress.

“My dear, you’re looking particularly happy tonight,” Mrs. Leis said.

I smiled at her. “It’s been an interesting day.” I pulled my order pad and pencil out of my smock pocket.

“Oh, interesting days are always the best,” Mrs. Leis said. “Speaking of interesting—how is Mr. Cahill doing?”

I froze. Did she know I’d been to Mr. Cahill’s house? Had a neighbor seen me coming or going?

Mrs. Leis looked perplexed. “You did say last week that you were going to be in his art class?”

Relief rushed through me. She was just making chitchat. Still, my hand shook as I finally jotted “Blue Plate special x2” on my order pad.

“Yes. We’re learning about shading.” My voice shook a little and I wondered if Mrs. Leis would notice, but I was saved by Mr. Leis reaching into his inside jacket pocket for the gospel tract “Are You on the Right Road to Salvation, Or…” The images completed the rest of message: In a wood-paneled station wagon, Dad cheerfully drove a beaming Mom, Sis, and Brother toward the lovely angel-inhabited cloud at the top of the pamphlet, while a bearded man drove his hapless companion, a buxom woman swigging from a liquor bottle, toward the flames at the bottom. Mr. Leis always left this tract, plus thirty-five cents, as the tip.

Mrs. Leis directed her attention at her husband. “Not yet, dear; Donna has just brought us coffee. She hasn’t taken our order yet!” Mr. Leis was a deacon at Grandma’s church, the Groverton First Church of God. The Sunday before, he’d tried to eat the flowers from the top of Mrs. Whitstone’s hat, mistaking the silk rosebuds for some kind of fruit. I’d figured cherries, but I wondered—ripe persimmons?

“I’m so glad to hear that Mr. Cahill is doing well,” Mrs. Leis said to me. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You know, I’ve been pushing for an art teacher to come to Groverton Senior High for years.”

Mrs. Leis was on the school board, the only woman who’d ever served. Grandma said she put on airs because of it, but I think what she really meant was that a woman didn’t have any business sitting in meetings with men.

“What’s more essential to humans than art?” Mrs. Leis was saying, while gently moving Mr. Leis’s hands apart—he
was clicking the Dutch boy and girl shakers together, like they were kissing. “Even the cavemen knew that art was essential.” She laughed. “Well, I couldn’t exactly make
that
argument, now, could I?”

“No, ma’am.” The hint of evolution wouldn’t have gone over well, especially from the sole female board member. I had to smile, even with Grandma glaring in the background. I liked Mrs. Leis’s pluck. I wondered if I’d ever have it…or if maybe I already did.

“Fortunately, the Dentons came to town.”

My mouth pursed in a silent oh-no. What did Jimmy’s family have to do with this?

Mrs. Leis mistook my alarm for curiosity and said, “Oh, I met Mrs. Denton at one of those boring Groverton Women’s Club lunches. Luckily, we hit it off. Her love of art came up, and I pointed out that Riverdale Senior High has had an art class for three years now.” Riverdale was our town’s biggest football rival. “And, much to my delight, she said she knew from her college days the perfect person to fill the job of art teacher.”