The Sisters (12 page)

Mother sighed loudly and turned her face toward Daddy, her lips pressed tightly together. “I still say it’s the boy that ought to come to the girl’s on holidays.” She stared hard at Daddy to make clear she expected him to answer. “Any holiday.”

Daddy said nothing. There was nothing to say. When Alma had told him about the invitation, he’d said it was fine with him, only that she needed to get driving directions from Gordon, since he’d never been in that part of town. Mother was still furious that Alma hadn’t come to her about the invitation first, and ever since, she had been taking it out on Daddy. “Well, if we don’t get home in time to get the sparklers out for her,” Mother said, cocking her head to indicate Rainey, “then it’ll be your job to hush her up.”

That was enough to rouse Rainey from her faint. She could work up tears faster than anybody Alma had ever seen. “
Daddy,
” Rainey whined and sputtered. “You
prom
ised!”

While Daddy tried to soothe her, saying if they couldn’t do the sparklers tonight they’d do them tomorrow, Alma just shook her head. Spoiled. Spoiled. Much as she hated to think it, that was Daddy’s fault. Well, Mother’s, too, for allowing it. One thing was sure: No child of hers would ever behave in such a way. She’d done her best these last several years to give Mother suggestions about how to get Rainey to mind, but it never did any good. It seemed like every month there was an article in
The Ladies’ Home Journal
or
Good Housekeeping
about how to correct a naughty child, but even when Alma showed her mother the clippings—advice from real experts—she waved them away and said, “You just wait ’til you have one of your own, and then we’ll see,” as if having a child was some kind of divine punishment for all one’s accumulated foolishness.

Indeed, they would see. Already, just from the articles she’d saved, Alma had practically an entire housekeeping and child-care encyclopedia, and she was proud at how usefully she’d organized it: a gold scrapbook for decorating, brown for cooking, green for gardening, white for cleaning, blue for child care, and red for first aid and home safety. Other girls she knew wasted their pocket money on movie magazines, but long before she’d even had an idea of whom she might marry, Alma had been planning her life as a young bride. She had Mrs. Murchison to thank for that—and she had the heavens and the flood to thank for Mrs. Murchison.

After that long journey from Newman, first drenched and cold on the big truck, then stifled in the boxcar of a train with other people escaping the flood, entering the Murchisons’ living room in Greenwood had been like entering a palace. Even now, every once in a while, Alma heard Mother complain to someone about how that Murchison woman had left them standing for ages on cotton rugs she’d spread out to protect her fancy carpet from their dirty shoes, saying how they were welcome in her home but, Mother said, never offering her a seat, “And me with my back aching, big as a cow.” Alma, though, had not minded at all. It would have broken her heart to get a speck of dirt on that luscious blue carpet with the golden swirls, or on the lovely furniture upholstered in rich shades of velvet.

What Alma remembered most about those first few days was that she was happier than she ought to have been. They didn’t know where Daddy was or what had become of their house, and Mother mostly stayed in her room, moaning quietly, sometimes from the baby and sometimes about her sofa or her new stove. Alma was careful not to show her happiness, smiling only when thanking Mrs. Murchison for a cup of hot chocolate or Mr. Murchison for offering her part of his newspaper to look at, but inside she was warm with pleasure. Mother didn’t fuss at her openly like she did at home, and Mrs. Murchison let Alma help polish the furniture, but instead of snatching away the cloth and saying she was doing it wrong like Mother would have, Mrs. Murchison showed her the right way. At night, Mrs. Murchison tucked her into a bed dressed with smooth sheets that had been kept in a drawer with a lavender sachet. Every morning on his way to work, Mr. Murchison stopped to send a telegram to Daddy, telling him where they were, and every evening on his way back, he stopped to inquire for a reply.

After nearly two weeks, the reply finally came: Daddy was fine; he was living in a tent city, sharing a tent with a couple of other men, spending his days cleaning up Newman. He thanked the Murchisons for taking in his family and promised to get there to collect them as soon as he could. Mrs. Murchison made a lemon cake to celebrate, and after dinner she gave Alma the telegram, along with a new pair of scissors and a bottle of paste, suggesting she save it in her Shirley Temple scrapbook with newspaper articles about the flood. The Murchisons were rich enough to take papers from Louisville, Indianapolis, and Chicago, so it didn’t take long for Alma to fill nearly a third of the book. Seeing that, Mrs. Murchison said, “I think you have enough of those flood pictures now, dear,” and brought her a stack of old magazines. “You cut out anything you’d like. Perhaps you would enjoy picking out the things you’d like to have in your new house.” Alma smiled at that, and over the next several weeks, she had decorated her fantasy house ten times over, always going to Mrs. Murchison to ask advice on color, and whether it was appropriate to paper the walls with a floral if your furniture was in a patterned chintz.

She forgot about Daddy’s promise to come, and she nearly forgot about Mother, who now seemed like nothing more than a strange, reclusive neighbor. They’d been at the Murchisons’ a little over three weeks when, one bright Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Murchison drove Alma into Indianapolis—the Murchisons had their own car, which gleamed like fresh buttermilk—and there they shopped for a new dress for Alma while Mr. Murchison stayed behind in Greenwood to talk to Mother. That dress was the prettiest she’d ever owned, soft yellow organdy sprinkled all over with tiny embroidered pink roses. When they got back, she ran to show it to Mother, who looked at the dress for only a second, then turned her face to the wall and said, “Don’t be getting used to such things.”

“Alma, come in here for a moment,” Mr. Murchison called from the living room. He held out his hands for her to come and stand before him while he sat in his chair. “I’ve had a letter from your father,” he said. “We’ve decided it’s best for you and your mother to stay here until he can get your house ready for you. The baby will come anytime now and it would be too hard on your mother not to be in a proper house. You’ll go to school here and finish out the year.” Alma forgot herself in her joy and flung her arms around Mr. Murchison’s neck. He patted her back awkwardly, saying, “You’re a good girl not to cry,” then unlocked her grasp and went to join his wife in the kitchen.

At school Alma said nothing about the flood and pretended that she was the Murchisons’ niece, who had come from Boston to stay with them for the spring, and possibly forever. Secretly, she liked imagining that the Murchisons were her true parents, and she had to pinch herself sometimes to keep from calling them Mother and Daddy. Alma barely saw her mother at all—she was in bed for the last few weeks before the baby came and for the next week after—and Alma thought so little about Daddy that when Mr. Murchison brought him in from the train station the day he came up to see the baby, she almost didn’t recognize him. He picked her up and hugged her against his smelly old shirt, calling her his “brave Alma girl,” but then he set her down and spent most of the rest of his visit cooing at the baby, carrying her when she fussed, rocking her to sleep with his funny hobbling walk. Alma thought the baby ought to be called Ernestine, after Mrs. Murchison, but Daddy insisted on calling her Rainey. She didn’t remember Mother voting.

Ten years had passed since Daddy had taken her and Mother and the baby back to Newman, far away from the Murchisons’ beautiful house, but Alma still corresponded regularly with her friend. Mrs. Murchison often included in her letters helpful hints she had learned at her club meetings, and during the war, when so much was scarce, she always wrote beneath her signature the saying, Practicality need not come at the sacrifice of beauty. Alma had liked that so much she’d made a sampler of it, spending an entire Saturday measuring and lightly sketching out the words with dressmaker’s chalk on a small piece of linen she’d found in Mother’s sewing basket, devoting nearly a week of afternoons to embroidering it. At the time, she had wanted to add a border of flowers to frame the words, but she was afraid of getting the petals uneven and spoiling the sampler. Now she was glad she hadn’t tried, having come to see the sampler as more elegant for its simplicity.

“Alma, read me the last couple of directions on there.” Daddy was reaching back over the seat with the slip of ivory paper on which Gordon had written the instructions, perfectly neatly. “I’m on Mymosaw now,” he said.

“
Mim-O-sa,
Daddy.”

“That some kind of Jap tree?”

Alma pressed her hand to her forehead and took a deep breath. “It’s two more streets to a left on Dogwood,” she said, “and then it’s the next right onto Plum. They’re number five hundred.”

Alma leaned back in the seat and opened her purse to get her mirror. Just as Daddy made the turn onto Plum, Rainey pushed the grimy sole of her shoe against Alma’s skirt. Alma flung the foot away from her, which sent Rainey tumbling onto the floor, yowling.

“You children hush up back there,” Mother said.

Children.
Honestly, it was too much to bear, but snapping back would only convince Mother she was right, so Alma kept quiet. Now that she and Gordon were as good as engaged, Alma’s plan was to spend as much of the next year as possible with the Crisps. Next summer, when he’d finished medical school, they would marry, and even if they had to stay in the area for Gordon’s residency, they could make their home across the river in Louisville and she could see as little of her family as she liked. And after that, who knew where they might end up—Savannah, Chicago, Philadelphia, maybe even Boston.

Daddy turned the car into the drive for number 500. When Alma saw the red-white-and-blue silk bunting draped between the Doric columns on the Crisps’ entry porch and heard her mother say only, “Well,” she forgot about her hair and longed to reverse time, back to when Gordon had told her of his parents’ invitation. Then, she had thought only of how she wanted to show Mother and Daddy the kind of life she would someday have, but now, she could see how foolish that had been. How could she ever have considered mixing her parents with Gordon’s? Mrs. Crisp set even her everyday table with china and linen napkins. She used a gravy boat. Crystal candy dishes were artfully placed on the perfectly waxed surfaces of her mahogany occasional tables. The Crisps’ radio was concealed in a fine console cabinet, not standing garishly in the open on top of an old water-puckered veneer dresser, its frayed cord dangling. And what would happen when her family, who had never eaten any fish that wasn’t fried, were presented with Mrs. Crisp’s signature summer luncheon of cold salmon and tomato aspic? She should have lied to Gordon and said her parents couldn’t come and then done everything she could to keep the Crisps and her family apart until the wedding. The afternoon would be one humiliation after another. Daddy would treat the table service as if it were their own chipped dishes and dingy red-and-white-checked towels from Woolworth’s while he told stories about the happenings at Crother’s Mill. Mother would say nothing except a few thank-yous through tight-lipped smiles and act as though she were being asked to eat a beating heart from diamond dishes. Rainey would throw her hand over her face, crying “Ugh!” and refuse to eat anything until she saw the aspic, which she would dive into, mistaking it for cherry gelatin.

Perspiration broke out across Alma’s face as she walked ahead of her parents toward the door. It was too late now to turn back. In the middle of the walk, she had to stop and hold her handkerchief to her lips for a moment until a wave of sickness passed. Surely Gordon had warned his parents that the Jorgensens, Alma excepted, were backward and vulgar, but it was one thing to hear of it and quite another to see it. The Crisps liked her well enough, she believed, but she feared they might also be urging Gordon to look around a bit—he could certainly do better. She longed to turn and plead with her family not to embarrass her, but Rainey would start making hideous faces, Mother would go sit in the car, and Daddy would shake his head and gaze at her, his eyes full of unfathomable hurt. There was nothing to do but breathe an earnest prayer to God to preserve her dignity, then ring the bell and wait.

S
EVEN

Expecting

Christmas 1953

Newman, Indiana

BERTIE

B
ERTIE SETTLED AN ORNAMENT MADE
to look like a basket of daisies on a back branch and pinched the wire hook to make it hold. What on earth daisies had to do with Christmas, she didn’t know, but the piece was from a set Hans had bought years ago, a whole summer garden in tissue-thin glass—daisies, irises, roses, violets, lilies. Seemed like that man was forever buying ornaments.

Picking one of the six angels out of the box—“sugar angels,” the girls called them, because their little white gowns sparkled—she tried to find a place where it would show. The angel wasn’t but an inch high, too small even for this little tree, but Hans and the girls would notice if she left it off. Foolishness, it was. She liked Christmas as well as anybody, but it didn’t make a lick of sense to spend money on something that would be on the trash heap in a week. Even this piddling tree had cost four dollars. The man at the Lions Club stand must have thought he was being real cute when he said they charged fifty cents a foot, “But they all start with two-fifty for the trunk!” He was wearing a Santa Claus hat, as if that justified robbery.