“Don’t bring my child up with such idols, Anna!” he called out to Mom, and he blew the flame out.
“Don’t take it away; I love it.” I started to cry. Then I remember Mom coming in and lighting the wick again, her eyes thin and her mouth tight.
“What have you got in your church a child can see?” Mom asked in a voice that was so cold and scornful it was like ice cracking in the water bucket.
“Please don’t take the picture away,” I begged, and Dad didn’t say anything more. Mom took the saucer away next day and never lighted a flame again, but the icon has always been in my room ever since.
I began writing again. “All the animals on the ranch were mine, or I felt them so. The cows, the team of horses that I rode bareback whenever I wanted, all of the series of dogs; only the sow I never laid any claim to nor the tom turkeys that always looked too bloody to me with their bright-red wattles. I think I have never been lonesome.
“We went to town often, but seldom on Saturday, when most of the ranchers went. I had a feeling that Father didn’t like it when the streets were filled with ranchers in clean work shirts, the little tags of their tobacco bags dangling out of one pocket, the color of their faces and necks giving away their occupation. Yet people must have told easily that we were ranchers. Dad always wore his best suit and a city hat, never the broad-brimmed Western hat. He carried cigarettes in a case that I was never tired of watching spring open at the pressure of a thumb. He wore oxfords instead of high shoes. Perhaps they couldn’t tell Dad was a rancher unless they looked at his hands, but he had Mom and me along.
“Mom wore a plain cotton print in summer, a dark wool dress in winter. She bought it in “The Big Store.” She never liked a hat on her head and never looked quite right in one. She never wore gloves in summer, and her hands were the color of the red-maple furniture you see in furniture-store windows; only her hands had fine lines of black that no amount of washing with the vegetable brush at the sink could quite take away, and her nails were always worn down at the finger tips. She was big-boned and solid, with broader shoulders than Father’s. Her lips of themselves were—Why do I put it in the past tense?—her lips are now red and full, and there is color on her high cheekbones. Her face is so calm and still it stands out from the animated or worried or cross faces of the town women, hurrying by on their eternal shopping. I guess I was thinking, too, of the contrast with women I had seen on the streets downtown in Minneapolis.
“For years I was a slim child with pale-yellow pigtails to the waist of my clean starched dress. I never wore a hat unless it was winter, and I wore socks and oxfords that Dad took pride in buying.
“Every time we went to Clark City Dad and I stopped to have our shoes polished at the Greek shoeshine place. I think it was one of the high spots of the trip for Dad. He would sit there, reading the paper he had bought, and feel like a city man.”
I held my pen still, remembering all those trips: the trip to the grocery store and to the hardware store or to the McCormick-Deering store for a piece of machinery, the briefer trips to “The Big Store” for some needles or thread or cloth. Usually we separated and Dad dropped into the lobby of the hotel to talk to someone. Mom and I went together, Mom walking along the aisles of the store, scarcely looking at the things that didn’t interest her, I hanging back as we went past the perfume counter, the fine soaps, then the pocketbooks and gloves and stockings. And yet, I really only wanted to look at them; I didn’t covet them; they would only have been a clutter around home.
I remembered the time when we did go to town on Saturday, the Saturday before Easter. All the women in Gotham had gone to town and bought new clothes to wear to church Easter Sunday. In the beginning, Dad had not intended to go. But Saturday came off so warm the winter wheat showed bright apple-green. We had left the breakfast dishes and gone outdoors to work. Dad set off with the drill to do some seeding. I was feeding the chickens and Mom was somewhere below the barn when all of a sudden Dad came back.
“Anna!” he called at the top of his voice.
I heard Mom answer and then I saw her running.
“Anna, tomorrow’s Easter!”
“I know.”
“Let’s go to town today.”
And instead of saying no when there was so much to do and everything, Mom laughed. “You want a Easter hat?”
“Well, you can’t work all the time.” Dad often said that to Mom. He tired before Mom did.
We drove into town that morning and had lunch at a restaurant. When we came out we stood together on the sidewalk the way ranchers do in town. Dad took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to me.
“Here, Ellen, go buy yourself a new Easter dress.”
When Dad had gone on down the street I handed the money to Mom to put in her big pocketbook for me. She pushed it off. “Keep it yourself, your father want you to buy with it.”
Without a sound my day broke into pieces, pieces with sharp cutting edges. I didn’t want any new dress. I only wanted to be in my jeans and old shirt at home. Mom was hurt because Dad hadn’t given her the money.
“I’ve got to go in hardware store and buy new ax handle,” Mom said. “Your Dad’ll never think. Go on, get your dress.”
Wretchedly I walked into the store where dresses were sold. Nothing drew me as it usually did, not even the long sheer silk stocking on a shapely glass leg. I watched some women coming in and hated them for the way they wore their clothes, and their trim ankles and shoes and the faint sweet smell as they passed me. I had been standing aimlessly against a counter by the front door. Suddenly I knew what I wanted. I went over to the stocking counter and said in a firm voice:
“I want a pair of silk stockings like those on that glass leg.” When the clerk asked what size I said, “A big size, about as large as you sell,” thinking of Mom’s legs as I often saw them in the row ahead of me when we worked in the garden.
“Those are three dollars,” the clerk told me, and I could see she doubted whether I could pay for them.
“I’ll take them,” I told her. Then I gave her the five-dollar bill and had two silver dollars back.
“Are they for a gift? I could wrap them with tissue paper for you.”
I didn’t want them to seem anything special. I said, “No, just everyday.”
I walked straight from the stocking counter to the perfume counter, where I had never had time to linger before. It was hard to know what to ask for. The salesgirl was unlike anyone I had ever seen outside a magazine.
“What scent do you have that smells Russian?” I asked.
“Russian? Let’s see—we have Cuir de Russe. That’s Russian leather.”
“I’d like to smell it.” The whiff seemed to penetrate back of my eyeballs. My eyes watered. “I’ll take two dollars’ worth,” I said.
The lady at the counter gave me a bottle so tiny it didn’t look as though it could cost more than a quarter, but I paid her. Mom still has the bottle on her dresser, along with a picture of Dad in his uniform and a hand-painted pin tray with “New York City” written on it. The perfume bottle is still half-full.
“You get your dress?” Mom asked when I found her. She had the ax handle in her hand.
“No, I bought these for you.” I thrust the paper sack and the little package at her and took the ax handle. I busied myself with an assortment of screws. Mom was so quiet I had to look at her. Her face was different. It wasn’t as firm as usual.
“Yeléna, your Dad won’t like it.”
“He gave it to me. It’s mine.” But I wasn’t anxious to see him and have him ask me about the dress. He did ask me, and I said I couldn’t find one I liked so I bought something else I wanted. He whistled and smiled. Dad never was stern or angry with me—only at life and the weather and his own illness.
“What did you buy?”
“Some perfume and stockings,” I mumbled. Mom was in the back seat arranging parcels.
“So you had a hankering for perfume and silk stockings. You’
re growing up. Nobody would think it to see you in your jeans. What do you think of that, Anna?”
Mom didn’t answer and Dad let the matter drop. He had another idea. Easter had gone to his head.
“Why don’t we stay overnight and go to church on Easter like civilized people?”
I held my breath.
“We’ve got the stock to take care of,” Mom said doggedly.
“They can wait. We’d be back by two o’clock. It would do us good. We haven’t been to church since . . .”
“Since we went with your mother,” Mom said. That was before I was born, I was busy figuring to myself. Church wasn’t part of our living. But I wished Mom hadn’t said that. It was suddenly too close to breathe easily, even though we sat in the truck on the main street. Dad started to drop the idea and close up and then he didn’t.
“As I remember, you were a good Greek Catholic once. We don’t want Ellen not to know what the inside of a church looks like.”
The air cleared. That was the most exciting trip we had ever made to town. Mom and I bought nightgowns in Montgomery Ward’s and we packed them in a little straw suitcase Mom carried her parcels in. We stayed at the hotel where Dad often sat and talked in the lobby, a big glittering place that awed Mom and me. We had a room I can see now. The carpet went from wall to wall. The furniture was big and shining, with a full-length mirror in the door. There was a bathroom between the rooms, with the first big white bathtub I had ever used.
I couldn’t remember a time when Dad had been so gay. He called up and ordered ice water sent up to the room and tipped the boy who brought it, as though he were a king.
“Remember the hotel we stayed in the night after we got into New York?” he said to Mom. “I told you we were having our honeymoon and you thought ‘honey’ was the word for ‘hotel,’ Anna!” I walked into the bathroom and drew water out of the shiny faucet, feeling good because they were laughing.
It was a wonderful night. We didn’t eat dinner in the beautiful dining room; that cost too much. We went out to a cafeteria, and I thought of that cafeteria some days when I was serving in the one here.
I lay awake that night looking at my room until I knew every object in it. Light from the alley came in the window and shone in the mirror like the moon does at home. It was better at night, because you couldn’t see the dust along the edge of the carpet or that the rose-silk lampshade was punched through. I liked listening to footsteps in the hall and cars out in the street, and my body felt delicious after its hot all-over bath.
When I woke in the morning I had a funny feeling. I was afraid something would go wrong. Dad came into my room all dressed in a new white shirt he had bought himself. He’d had a shave downstairs in the hotel barbershop and he looked as though he didn’t know wheat from barley.
“Well, Ellen, how do you like it?”
“All right,” I told him. Something in me wouldn’t let me sound any more pleased for fear . . . fear. Maybe it’s because I was born on a dry-land wheat farm and I know you’ve got to be afraid every spring even though the wheat stands brave and green, afraid until the wheat’s cut and stored, afraid of drought and hail and grasshoppers. Dad is, always. Mom used to say to him, “If you’re going to be afraid of drought all the time, you might as well be afraid of planting in the first place.” Yet Mom is the one that feels it worst when the drought comes.
When Mom came into my room to braid my hair she had on her new silk stockings I’d given her and the scent of the perfume was on her. The stockings fitted her ankles and legs better than skin. They were too fine for the black laced low shoes she wore, but they were beautiful. Such a pride came up in me it almost drove out the little fear. I think that’s why folks dress up in their best clothes when they do something special—to keep them from being afraid anything will spoil it. I had another bath that morning and I felt as light as tumbleweed, but a lot cleaner.
We had breakfast at the cafeteria down the street. Dad had a paper to read while he ate and he gave Mom the woman’s part and me the funnies.
“It’s been nearly twelve years, Anna, since I’ve had a morning paper to read at breakfast. By heaven, this is living like a white man!”
And suddenly, I was proud that Dad knew how to live, that he was used to places like hotels. Mom loved it, too. Her eyes were bright and dark. I leaned toward her a little and there was the delicious smell of “Russian leather” again, nicer than fresh hay or sweet clover or buffalo willows in the spring and as penetrating as the smell of sage. I looked at the three of us in the mirror. We might have been travelers just passing through town for the day.
“I don’t like letting the cows and pigs and chickens an’ all wait for their food,” Mom said, but Dad didn’t hear her.
“Well”—he folded the paper on the table—”it’s close to ten. Where do you want to go?”
Mom looked surprised. “To church, Ben.”
I remember driving along the streets, quiet on that Easter Sunday morning. Bells on one church began ringing. I had never heard church bells before.
“Let’s go where the bells are, Dad,” I begged.
We could pick out the churches easily from the steeples that reached up above the roofs of the bungalows. I leaned way out of the car to try to see the bells swinging in the tower, the way they do on Christmas cards. I noticed how the sun glinted hard on the cross that topped the spire, like the sun on the lightning rod on the Hendersons’ barn.
“Sit back, Ellen,” Dad said. He stopped the car and Mom got out.
“I think I’ll take Ellen over to the Congregational Church, Anna.”
Mom leaned against the car door. All her face waited. I knew with dreadful certainty that the thing had come, the thing I had feared when I woke up this morning, the thing that would spoil our day. I couldn’t say anything. I looked at the people going into church, whole families together. Some of them wore flowers. The bell was still ringing. The double door opened and I caught a glimpse of brightness, of candles far down in front, and the stained-glass windows.
Dad was making the engine sound louder with his foot. “We’ll come back for you at twelve or as soon as our service is over, Anna. Wait right out in front.”
I wanted with all my heart to go with Mom. It was no good this way. I held my hands tight together. Why didn’t Mom say something? Her face was firm like it is when she goes to kill a turkey.
“Now I don’t want any church,” she said.
“Oh, Mom, come with us,” I said as she opened the door of the car. Mom shook her head. Her lips came out farther than usual. “I go to his church once. Everyone is too busy look at me to say prayers.” The hard cold feeling was there. Nothing could help now. It was no use.
Dad pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The engine roared so loud people on their way to church looked at us. Dad drove back down from the quiet shady streets where people lived, out the road toward home. I watched the road straight ahead without looking at Mom or Dad. They didn’t speak. After a while I looked down at Dad’s shoes with the city shine on them, at Mom’s silk stockings so thin and smooth they showed a blue vein through.
We were more than fifteen miles toward home when Dad said, not to Mom or me, just aloud, “I guess we’ve lost our religion out here along with some other things.” He didn’t sound mad, only discouraged. We never drove into town to go to church again.
“Tell about your religion,” Mr. Echols had said. “How much it has meant to your family, to you.” The sheet in front of me was blank. I hadn’t written a word for an hour.
It was just there that I looked up and saw Gilbert watching me. I always remembered that meeting him was mixed in with my writing my biography, as though I must have known how deeply he was to be part of my life. He met my eyes and smiled. I smiled a little in return. He picked up his book and came over to my table and I saw again how slender and tall he was. He took the chair next to me.
“I’ve seen you here for two months. It’s time we knew each oth
er. How about calling it a day and going over to Pop’s Place for a coke?”
I hesitated, then I put my pencil down. “Okay,” I said. We went down the marble stairs together.
“My name’s Gilbert Borden—Gil. I’ve been trying to find out what yours is.”
“Ellen,” I told him. “Ellen Webb.”
“I like that. It fits you. Where do you come from, Ellen Webb? You must be a freshman, because I’d have seen you if you’d been around here.”
“I came this fall from Montana.”
“It would be some place far away and unusual.”
I remember laughing at that. I remember how we laughed at all kinds of things. Everything we told each other seemed exciting. He was a senior in the school of architecture.
“Any other year I’d have been working for the Paris fellowship. If I got it this year, I’d have to take it in Cincinnati or Cleveland or some place. Anyway, I’ll probably go into the Army in June.”
That, too, gave a deeper color to everything he said. We had a booth in Pop’s, the last one. Gil kept punching out “Tomorrow Is a Lovely Day” on the jukebox. He played it over again three times. I felt as though I’d known him for years.
We walked back across campus and sat on the steps of the auditorium. The lights along the mall seemed to lie at our feet. We sat against one of the pillars, so we weren’t cold.
“No kidding, I’ve watched you in the library ever since the first week in October. You came in and sat down there at the end of that same table and the sun on your hair made it shine like silver.”
“I’ve seen you, too,” I said.
“You didn’t take much time from your work to look my way!”
“I can’t. I have a job at the cafeteria and it takes quite a lot of time. Don’t you ever go there?”
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