by Sarah Ellis
Eight
The next morning the glorious run of sleeping in was over. Dad shook Charlotte awake at eight.
“Sorry, kiddo. Crisis at the store. I’ve got to pick up a load of mixed tropicals and Mom’s got one of her heads. Can you come and help out, just for an hour or so?”
“What about Miss Biscuit?”
“It’s Wednesday.”
Wednesday Miss Biscuit went to a prison to teach criminals to read.
“What about James?”
“He’s got something on at school. Believe me, Charlotte, I’ve already considered all the other possibilities.”
Dad sounded fed up. He often did sound fed up when Mom had a migraine. Charlotte knew it was because he couldn’t stand seeing her in pain, but it came off as grumpy to everybody else.
She allowed herself a sigh. Okay, it was kind of a teenage sigh but, honestly, since James had turned into Mr. Commerce-know-it-all he was always somewhere else when something needed to be done.
She stuck one leg out from under the covers. “All right.”
Tom Ed was in the kitchen drinking orange juice and poring over his booklet.
“Okay, here are the occupations in strong national demand: Surgeon. Steel plate bender. Cutter, ready-to-wear garments except leather. What have they got against leather? And how come you’re up so early?”
Charlotte explained about mixed tropicals, headaches, prison visits and her conveniently absent brother.
“Can I come? My shift doesn’t start till three. I’d like to see the house-plant business from the inside.”
The morning took a turn for the better.
* * *
“Show Tom Ed the ropes, okay?” Dad said. “And if you get a minute, you can mark down the lilies. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
Charlotte handed Tom Ed a spray bottle. “Just don’t spritz the African violets.”
Half an hour until opening. Lights on, blinds up, coffee plugged in. The morning routine was automatic. When Charlotte circled back to the cash desk, Tom Ed was still standing there, holding the spray bottle.
“Uh, African violets? We haven’t had the pleasure of being introduced.”
Charlotte giggled. “Never mind. It wouldn’t really matter if you murdered the African violets because nobody buys them anyway.”
“Then why do you stock them?”
“They are Miss Biscuit’s favorite. They’re actually more like family members than merchandise. Just like the macramé plant hangers. We only sell one in a blue moon but Miss Biscuit likes to make them. Drives James crazy. He wants the store to be way more efficient and run according to business principles and he thinks we should hire people with more dynamic sales skills. But Dad and Mom would never fire Miss Biscuit because without this job their pension wouldn’t stretch.”
“Okay, can you teach me everything I need to know in …” Tom Ed looked at his watch, “twenty minutes?”
“Sure. But what you need to know isn’t about plants but about customers. Basically you get four kinds of people. You get your hippies. You get people who treat their plants like pets and play music to them. You get health-food types who use plants for medicine. And you get people who are buying plants for their downtown offices or swanky apartments. Really we only make money from that group because they buy the big stuff.”
There were customers at the door right at opening, a couple from group four. The woman gave a quick, mouth-only smile when Charlotte unlocked the door and said good morning.
“Anything I can help you with?”
“We’ll ask,” said the man firmly, flicking raindrops off his coat.
Right. Charlotte joined Tom Ed behind the desk and began to flip through a plant catalog. Behind the desk was an excellent vantage point for snooping and eavesdropping. It never occurred to customers, especially the ones who didn’t see you, that you could see them.
“I don’t know,” said the woman. “Plants seem so …” she wiggled her fingers in the air, “fussy.”
The man nodded. “No little pots. Can’t stand all these little pots. We want to make a bold statement, but minimalist.”
“Weeping fig,” Charlotte said in a low voice to Tom Ed. “Just watch. They’ll buy a weeping fig. They’re weeping fig kind of people.”
“So don’t you want to go nudge them a bit?”
“Nah. They said they’d ask if they needed help.”
“Maybe they don’t know they need help. Which ones are the weeping figs? Let me give this a try.”
Seconds later, Tom Ed was ma’am-ing and y’all-ing away for all he was worth in the weeping fig corner. The swanky couple started to blossom like giant hibiscus.
Charlotte watched in admiration. Tom Ed told them exactly what they had told each other about fussy and bold statements but he told them in Texan and they nodded like crazy.
“Three’s what you need. Wun dudn’t say anythang. Three says stahl.”
After some more Texan sales talk the couple decided on three non-variegated weeping figs and three expensive black pots.
“Lots of light. Don’t move them around. Don’t overwater,” said Charlotte as she dealt with their credit card.
The Swanks left happy.
“Wow,” said Charlotte. “Big sale and it’s only 10:30.”
Tom Ed grinned and shrugged. “I think I deserve some coffee. You?”
Charlotte shook her head. She and Dawn had tried to like coffee but they agreed that even with lots of cream and sugar it still tasted like mud.
“You have it. I’ll get a Coke. There’s usually some hidden in the cooler behind the roses.”
Tom Ed had wedged himself on a stool between the desk and the wall.
“So, Mr. Salesman of the Month, how did you do that?”
“You just pretend. You park your real self and put on a salesman self. It’s like make-believe.”
“But isn’t that kind of phony?”
“Phony? I guess, but it’s not like that self isn’t there somewhere. You just tune in the station and turn up the volume.”
Charlotte slurped her Coke. “Parents always say be yourself, like that’s easy. Which self?”
“Not my parents. Well, not my daddy, anyway. He’d never say be yourself. His whole thing is Be Me.”
After such a promising start, business slowed to a halt. Cars swished by on the wet street. Umbrellas blossomed.
Tom Ed wound his legs around the stool. “I’d say you’re pretty good at being yourself.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. That whole Unteen thing. You’re not just playing along with what everybody expects. That takes gumption.”
Charlotte grinned. “Gumption! Nobody says gumption.”
“I do. Gumption, gumption, gumption, gumption, gumption …”
Coke went up Charlotte’s nose. “Stop!”
“Gumption, gumption, double gumption, gumption …”
There was a clatter from the back door and a gust of cool air.
“Dad’s back.”
Tom Ed unwound himself from the stool.
“I’ll go give him a hand. Thanks for the talk, Miz Charlotte.”
Time to mark down the lilies. Charlotte scrambled around in the desk drawer for the label thingy. Purple tape would be appropriate.
EASTER LILIES, ker-chunk, ker-chunk. 50% OFF. She felt daydreamy and totally awake at the same time.
The thing about talking to Tom Ed was that it wasn’t like talking to a boy. Not that it was like talking to a girl. Also, it wasn’t like talking to a grown-up but it wasn’t like talking to someone her own age either.
It was just talking. Talking to a human person. A human be-in.
* * *
Time out of time. Thursday and Friday morning Charlotte hung out with the Texan human be-in. She took to getting up e
arlier. He made iced tea, which he just called tea because normal tea was called hot tea.
Tom Ed had questions about Charlotte’s parents.
“Why do they sometimes say thee instead of you?”
“It’s a Quaker thing. It’s called plain speaking. My grandmother, the one who died, always spoke that way. But Mom and Dad don’t really do it anymore except when it sometimes slips out. I don’t even notice.”
They listened to the Mothers of Invention, the strangest music Charlotte had ever heard, full of screeching and creepy whispering. (James, wandering by, said “pretentious garbage.”) They talked about everything under the sun — the nuclear bomb, really good cars, letters in Ann Landers, Martin Luther King, what cats thought and were we just a bunch of atoms whirling around.
Afternoons and evenings Charlotte did all the holiday stuff. Badminton, a really stupid movie called The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, shopping, daytime TV and babysitting. She was slogging her way through adolescence in Samoa but it was turning out to be a big disappointment.
Friday morning she did a preview report for Tom Ed while they sat on the back porch.
“It’s no good.”
“How come?”
“Sure, the girls don’t have to do the teenager thing but they have to work all the time. Lola and Mala and Siva, they don’t have much of a life. They have to grind coconut and weave and carry water and go on errands but mostly they have to babysit.”
“You babysit. You babysat last night.”
“Yeah, but it’s only for a few hours and I get paid. Plus snacks and good TV. Those girls have to keep the little kids out of trouble and keep them from crying and bugging the adults all day long. They get to have a bit of fun around age seventeen and then they get married and have babies of their own and then it’s work, work, work again. Boys have it much better in Samoa.”
“Wake up and smell the coffee, Charlotte. Men have it better everywhere. More power, more money.”
“Maybe, but I wouldn’t want to be a boy because they have all these stupid rules.”
“Rules?”
“Yeah. It’s like the commandments of being a boy. Thou shalt not carry a lunch kit. Thou shalt not have a kickstand on your bike. Thou shalt not carry an umbrella. Thou shalt not wear a shirt and pants that match too much. Thou shalt not cry even if you break your collarbone falling off the monkey bars and it is actually sticking out or even if your puppy gets run over.”
Tom Ed laughed. “Yeah, and thou shalt never lose even if it’s something like how many times can you throw a peanut in the air and catch it in your mouth.”
“It just seems so hard.”
“It is.”
“But girls don’t get drafted.”
Tom Ed pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and held it out. Charlotte folded the stick in half and half again and started chewing.
“You’ve got a point there. But there’s other ways of being wrecked by the war than being over there. Jimilene? She says the difference between men and woman is that women have to clean up the mess. Doctors do surgery. Nurses clean up. When babies poop or puke, daddies hand them to the mother to deal with. And those soldiers coming home from Nam, missing legs, crazy? Who’s going to clean up that mess? Jimilene says women’ll have to do it. She says women just have to go around with buckets picking up the pieces of what men break.”
“Jimilene sounds smart.”
Tom Ed nodded. “I miss her most of anyone.”
“Charlotte!” The back door whammed open and James burst through. “Where the heck is my tennis … Oh. What are you doing here?”
It was rude. What was it with James? Whenever he was in the same room with Tom Ed he got all prickly. Okay, so he didn’t agree with draft dodging. That didn’t mean he got to act like a jerk.
“Discussing women’s lib with your sister.”
Tom Ed sounded extra slow and drawly. Was he being rude back? Charlotte couldn’t tell but what she could tell was that the conversation had become a code and that she was being left out.
Time to get things back on track.
“Did you have a question about your tennis racket?”
“Yeah, did you take it? It’s not in the closet.”
“Why would I …” Oh. “Um. I think it’s in the laundry room.”
James just gave her the look — the hairy-eyeball look.
“There was this dead bird in the raspberries and I used the racket to get it out and then I took it into the laundry room to wash the dead bird germs off it and —”
“Right.” James disappeared back into the house.
Tom Ed stretched and stood. “Okay. The cars are calling. See you later.”
Charlotte checked her watch. Half an hour to People in Conflict. She shifted Puff to a different place on her stomach and stared at her toenails. Maybe when Dawn got back tomorrow they should do pedicures. There was so much to tell her.
She replayed the morning’s conversation. Women’s lib? Was that what she and Tom Ed had been discussing? How did he do that? How did he make her feel like she knew things about things she didn’t know she knew about?
Nine
Dawn was due home around ten the next morning.
Charlotte was hanging around the phone but Mom kept calling people on a list to volunteer for some Quaker event.
“Mo-om! I’m waiting for a call from Dawn.”
“I won’t be a minute. Nearly done. I’ll just finish this phone tree and then I’ll head on down to the shop.”
Charlotte sat on the stairs and pulled pills off her cardigan. “I won’t be a minute” was one of those sentences that was almost always a lie. It meant I will be a minute and probably way more when Mrs. Plumtree can’t volunteer because she has sciatica. Another one was “Who cares?” which usually meant somebody cared a lot.
What were other guaranteed lies? Tom Ed would have some ideas. But he was at the car dealership, taking an extra shift.
“Claire, can you give me a hand here?” Uncle Claude’s face appeared around the corner.
“Oh, okay.” Mom crossed out a name on her list and retreated to the kitchen.
The phone had barely caught its breath when it rang again.
Charlotte leaped for it. “Dawn?”
“No, Monique. Hey! Did you see it? In today’s paper? It’s Dorcas’s mother. She’s trying to get O.O. fired!”
“What?”
“I know O.O. told us not to talk about this but we have to!”
“She can’t do that, can she?”
“I don’t know. You should read it. I didn’t really get it.”
“Okay, call you later.”
Mom reappeared brandishing her list. “Two more calls then I’m off.”
“Where’s the newspaper?”
Mom made a vague sweeping gesture. “Living room? I haven’t seen it this morning.”
Charlotte checked the living room and the cluttered dining-room table. She made her way through the jungle of the front hall and out onto the front porch. No luck.
In Dawn’s house the newspaper was kept in the magazine rack. In Dawn’s house they threw away the old newspapers. They didn’t cut bits out of them and leave the rest on top of the fridge or stuffed down the chair cushions.
Using powers of deduction, she finally found it in the hydrangea bush next to the front door. The new paperboy didn’t have a very good aim.
There she was on the front page. Mrs. Radger, hunched over a podium, looking both kinds of mad and pointing. Her eyes were scrunched up, her mouth didn’t seem to have any lips and she had helmet hair a bit like Juliet’s mother.
Charlotte sat on the front steps and scanned the article.
Mrs. Radger had a new campaign. Turned out that after hauling Dorcas out of class, she went around to libraries and found out which ones had a copy of
Catcher in the Rye. Then, a few days later, she made a speech at city council and talked about the smut that children were being exposed to in schools and libraries and how some teachers were poisoning children’s minds and that if Miss O. O. McGough would not purge her classroom library she would personally see to it that she was fired.
“Smut.” Charlotte said it out loud to the hydrangea.
Good word. You could sound really angry and disgusted when you said it.
The faint sound of the phone brought her down to earth, and she went back inside.
Mom again! “Yes, that’s lovely. A lemon loaf would be perfect. Yes, eleven o’clock. See you then. Bye.”
Charlotte held the paper in front of her mother’s face.
“Charlotte, what are you doing? Oh. Oh, my goodness. Poor Miss McGough. That’s just outrageous. How did we end up with someone like Mrs. Radger on council? Oh, well, she just likes to make a noise. I expect it will all blow over.”
Charlotte pictured Mrs. Radger flying across the sky, smiling liplessly, one arm outstretched, hairdo unmussed by the storm. Like Mary Poppins, except no umbrella.
“Mom! Don’t you remember? I need to phone Dawn.”
“Just one more call.”
“But you’ll start chatting and it will take forever!” Charlotte recognized that she was using the teenage whine but she was doing so deliberately, for a particular purpose.
“I’ll stick to business. Honest.”
Her own phone. The first thing that Charlotte was going to get when she landed on squares six/seven was her own phone.
Finally. Dawn answered on the first ring.
“Charlie! Your phone’s been busy forever. It was the best, the entirely best week of my whole life so far and I have huge news.”
Charlotte tucked the phone against her shoulder, put her feet up on the phone table and settled in. Dawn was obviously about to burst.
“It’s about my hair.”
“Tell.”
“It’s a long story.”
Charlotte wound the phone cord around her toes. “Tell.”
“So, on the second night of camp there was a costume party. Nobody really had costumes so we had to invent something, like a joke. Mr. Giesbrecht, the brass guy who’s kind of scary? He just pulled his arms out of his jacket and kind of lurched around like a monster. And Mr. Nelson wore his conductor’s suit and had a single cigarette in the pocket and kept going around saying, ‘Bond. James Bond.’ So I looked around to see what I could find. Marilyn — you remember Marilyn with the French horn?”
