Secret Lives

by Amoss, Berthe;

  “What in the world was your Uncle Malvern yelling about? That dog didn’t bite him, did it?”

  “Pumpkin wouldn’t bite anybody! Uncle Malvern is allergic to dog hair. Stopped breathing when he saw Pumpkin—he says.”

  “He can still yell pretty good. That is the skinniest dog I ever saw.”

  “You’d be skinny, too, if the SPCA man had taken your mother away and gone after you with a net. Poor little Pumpkin.”

  “Pumpkin? Why don’t you call her Ribs?”

  Tom ignored the insult. “She’s almost the right color for a pumpkin, and Halloween’s coming,” he said. “Pumpkin’s so smart, she hid until the SPCA left. I crawled under the house and rescued her, huh, Pumpkin, old girl? I rescued you!”

  “What are you going to do with her?”

  “Addie, what would you do if somebody gave you a choice between what you want most in the whole world, but you had to leave home forever to have it, or, you could never have that one thing, but you could stay at home and have almost anything else?”

  “Well, if all you want is that dog you’re holding, I wouldn’t bother to leave home, even though you have to put up with your uncle and his beer.”

  “I don’t want to leave. But I will if I have to. Unless . . . unless . . .” Tom and Pumpkin were looking at me.

  “Tom, I can’t keep that dog for you! Aunt Eveline would have a fit. And Aunt Kate! Why, Aunt Kate’d die right on the spot. Honest. I can not!”

  I noticed Tom’s hair and freckles matched Pumpkin’s coat. There is definitely no resemblance between Tom and Edmond Hilary de St. Denis.

  “Addie, just for a while! I’m right next door, and I’ll be the one really taking care of her—until I talk my mother into keeping her. I’ll do anything you want. What do you want most in the world?”

  “You can’t give me what I want most in the world.”

  “Aw, come on, Addie! Aunt Eveline will let you keep good old Pumpkin if you beg her. Just for a while.”

  “No.”

  “Well, Addie, so long, then! I’m leaving,” said Tom, not going. “Good-bye.”

  I knew he was still working on me, but I didn’t want a mangy dog. Pumpkin didn’t look anything like my mother’s cute little Fifi.

  “I’ll be seeing you, Addie.”

  “That’s crazy. Where will you go?”

  “North Carolina.”

  “What’ll you do there?”

  “Live there. With my dog.”

  “Tom, your mother needs you to help with your uncle. Besides, Pumpkin isn’t all that great a dog.”

  Tom’s freckles changed color and his mouth turned thin white.

  “Now, Tom, I didn’t mean Pumpkin wasn’t a good dog!” Tom’s eyes were making holes right through me. “It’s just that I know what Aunt Eveline would say—”

  “Good-bye, Addie.”

  “Tom, now listen, Tom!”

  Pumpkin let out a bark that sounded like good-bye.

  “It’s been great knowing you,” Tom said.

  “Wait, Tom!”

  “Ah-de-la-eed!” Aunt Eveline was calling me. “Addie, dear!”

  “Tom! Listen!” I was looking at the back of Tom with the back of Pumpkin tucked under his arm.

  “Adelaide, when I call, please reply immediately. Addie, I want you to—”

  “Aunt Eveline, what would you say if someone gave you a choice: you could keep me, but you had to keep something else you didn’t want besides; or, you’d lose me and you could have anything else in the whole world you want.”

  “I only want you, dear.”

  “You don’t want anything else? I thought you wanted my mother to be buried in Saint Louis #2.”

  “I must be content with things as they are, dear.”

  “Then, you’d choose me and the other thing you didn’t want besides?”

  “I’d choose you above all else, dear, although I still nourish the hope that you will someday decide on a length for your bangs. Now, what I want you to do, Addie, is—”

  “My bangs are almost grown out, Aunt Eveline, and I’m glad you want me above all things, because I do need this other thing to be happy and I’m pleased you’ve chosen it.”

  “I was not aware of choosing this other thing. What is it?”

  “I can have it, can’t I?”

  “I’m sure you can, but perhaps you may not. What is it?”

  “Oh, Aunt Eveline! It’s a matter of life or death! Can I—may I have a dog? A very small one. She’s smart and I promise I’ll take care of her.”

  “A dog! Of course not! Absolutely not! Aunt Kate would—”

  “I won’t let Pumpkin bother Aunt Kate. I promise!”

  “Oh, Addie! How could you do that?”

  “I’ll keep her in my room.”

  “Inside?”

  “I’ll keep her outside. In the shed! Oh, please, Aunt Eveline!”

  “Oh, Addie!”

  “My mother had a dog.”

  “Fifi was sweet and very clean.”

  “Pumpkin is sweet, too, Aunt Eveline.”

  “Where is this dog?”

  “I’ll get it! Oh, you’ll see! You’ll love Pumpkin! Tom! Hey, Tom! Wait! You don’t have to go to North Carolina! Taw-m!”

  “Please, Adelaide! Don’t howl like a banshee!”

  Pumpkin wasn’t exactly Fifi the Second, but maybe if I bathed her and fattened her up and Tom taught her a few tricks . . .

  “Hey, Tom!” I ran down the street after Tom.

  Chapter III

  YOU CAN find your way around Three Twenty Audubon Street with your nose. Downstairs is cabbage, except for the mohair sofa, which is mothball, and the kitchen, which besides cabbage is Nini’s roux, the burnt flour and fat smell that begins her creole cooking. Upstairs is pure cloves.

  When I woke up the next morning, I fanned my room to make it clove-free. Aunt Kate’s room is next to mine and she has an ancient potpourri, a jar of faded rose leaves and spices, all completely drowned out by the cloves. The cloves smell was seeping under the door into my room. I could tell Pumpkin was allergic to cloves by the way she was running around sniffing for fresh air. I stuffed the crack with newspaper, but after breakfast, when Aunt Eveline inspected my room to see if I’d made my bed, she pulled the newspaper out with a long lecture on promises made and not kept.

  “The dog must remain outside, Adelaide. It smells very doggy in this room.”

  “You smell cloves, not Pumpkin. The cloves stink.”

  “Addie, do not use that word!”

  “But I can’t even smell my Fatal Moment,” I said, unstopping my perfume and dabbing little drops of it behind my ears, at my elbows, and on my wrists. “It’s all covered over by cloves, and Pumpkin almost suffocated last night!”

  “Adelaide, I smell no cloves whatsoever, and I am quite aware of your perfume when you douse yourself in that liberal fashion, totally unsuitable for a school day. Kindly put that dog in the shed. I will look in on her while you’re at school,” she added in a kinder tone.

  I brought Pumpkin to the shed, curled her up on my pillow, and closed the gate Tom had made from an old crate. On my way back upstairs I saw Aunt Eveline in the kitchen, putting scraps in a bowl for Pumpkin.

  Aunt Eveline is not so bad when she tries. Aunt Kate, on the other hand, is just too old to change. She is a whole generation older than my mother and Sandra Lee’s. Part of Aunt Kate seems already to have gone on to her reward, as Aunt Eveline puts it, and the other part is preparing. Never mind, Aunt Eveline says, she is laying up her treasure in Heaven, where her place is being made ready by those who have gone on before. There’s a lot of activity up there, I thought, stepping into my school dress and looking at the photograph of my grandmother, lost among children of all sizes, her own and older ones belonging to my grandfather’s first wife. One of the older girls in the picture is holding the baby of the family. The older girl is Aunt Eveline.

  “Addie, you’ll be late for school!” Aunt Eveline c
alled up the steps. “Finish dressing and don’t dawdle!”

  The baby in the picture is my mother. I tied my shoes and wondered why I’ve never learned to say “was” instead of “is” for my mother. It has been such a long time since my mother, father, and I lived in Honduras. My father was manager of a banana plantation there and my mother painted landscapes, until one day, a hurricane came along, and a tidal wave swept most of Belize and our house into the Gulf. My father saved me, but, in Aunt Eveline’s version of what happened, my mother was torn from his arms and hurled into the arms of the angels. I can’t remember any of it—a strange, funny thing when I stop to think how dramatic it must have been.

  “Ad-die! I see Sandra Lee on the steps already! What are you doing up there?”

  “I’m dressing, Aunt Eveline!”

  Aunt Eveline says my father died soon after of a broken heart, but the Honduran medical report called it malaria. I try to remember the bearded man whose picture sits on my dresser, but he is a stranger. He looks much older than my mother; I think he was closer to Aunt Eveline’s age. None of it makes any difference, because I lost both of my parents and came to live here at Three Twenty instead of in a normal house with a mother and father.

  “Ah-de-la-eed! Are you ready?”

  “I’m coming, Aunt Eveline!”

  Having Sandra Lee complete with parents and a normal house right next door makes it all ten times worse. Aunt Toosie and Uncle Henry’s cozy cottage is full of chintz, organdy, and fake Early American furniture. They never listen to opera on the radio. They play dance music on the phonograph, and once I even saw them roll back the rug and dance cheek to cheek.

  “At last!” Aunt Eveline said at the foot of the steps. “I sincerely hope you don’t make Sandra Lee, who was ready on time, miss the bell. Your hair! But never mind, I see her waiting very patiently in front of her house.”

  I don’t like to criticize Aunt Eveline or Aunt Kate, but they could take a lesson from Aunt Toosie and her cute cottage. Three Twenty, although free of cobwebs, is definitely spooky, with carved wood curling around everything you sit on and heavy brocade draperies choking the light out of the windows.

  “Now, Addie, be sure and buy milk for lunch. No Coke.”

  “Don’t forget to feed Pumpkin, Aunt Eveline.”

  I stopped suddenly on my way out the door. A plan had just occurred to me. “Aunt Eveline, we need a giant yard sale. I would start in the attic, if I were you, and work to the ground, and when we have everything out on the lawn, I’ll holler, ‘Come and get it! Then we’ll seal off the attic permanently, fumigate the rest of the house, and then, well, to tell you the truth, the easiest thing will be to sell Three Twenty and move miles away from Sandra Lee.”

  Aunt Eveline got all upset and failed to see the benefits of my plan. Aunt Kate said if my mother were alive, I’d be living in a jungle, and how would I like that, and Aunt Eveline calmed down and said that the colors are beautiful in Honduras, and I would have loved to paint there. I left for school before anything else could worry her, and she stood on the porch, smiling and waving, dressed all in lavender.

  Aunt Toosie was out on her porch, too, in a dress of pink and white checks. Sandra Lee shook her head so that her yellow curls bounced. She looked at me through her long lashes and twitched her little nose in a shy smile, all for Aunt Eveline’s benefit. I didn’t get another smile out of her the whole school day.

  That afternoon I was sitting at my dressing table, doing my nose-shortening exercise. Aunt Eveline says I have my father’s Family Nose and it is very aristocratic, but I’d like it better if it were less aristocratic and more like the one in my mother’s portrait. So I’m shortening it. I had a piece of adhesive tape across the bridge to keep my nose from humping, and another stuck on the sides and looped under like a sling to lift it. I had been sitting there for five minutes and my nose was just starting to shorten, when I heard Aunt Eveline clumping up the steps and heading straight for my closed door. I ripped off the adhesive tape and pretended to be combing my hair.

  No knock.

  “Addie, dear, I baked cookies for you and Sandra Lee to take to Sister Elizabeth Anne when you go for catechism. ‘Who made me?’ ”

  “ ‘God made me,’ ” I snapped back like a parrot.

  “ ‘Why did God make you?’ ” Aunt Eveline not only knows the answers, she knows all of the questions in the Baltimore Catechism.

  “ ‘God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him in the next.’ ” Not a preposition out of place.

  “Good. Your nose is red. What happened to it?”

  “Nothing. It’s not red.” If I said I had a cold, she’d give me milk of magnesia and put me to bed.

  “It is too red.” Sandra Lee’s face popped around the door. “And swollen! What are those two pieces of adhesive tape for?”

  She had come in my house and up the stairs silently, and I knew from the expression on her face that she already knew what the adhesive tape was for, and that, therefore, she must have been looking through the keyhole. You just don’t get any sneakier than that!

  By that time, my whole face was red, but Aunt Eveline was off on her favorite subjects, cleanliness and manners.

  “Now, Addie, wash your hands after playing with that dog.” Aunt Eveline couldn’t get in the habit of calling Pumpkin by her name. “And please remember to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No, Sister Elizabeth Anne,’ and not ‘uh-huh’ and ‘un-un.’ And, Addie, comb your hair before you leave. It looks like a bird’s nest.”

  Before Aunt Eveline could come up with suggestions of what to do so that my hair would look less like “monk in the bush,” I hurried to the bathroom, splashed water on my hands, slapped my hair with a brush, and, tearing back through my room, grabbed my catechism, charged down the steps, and banged the screen door as hard as possible so that, with a little luck, it would hit Sandra Lee as she followed close behind me, smirking and twitching her little nose.

  The nuns that teach our school live at the end of our block, and Sister Elizabeth Anne is always waiting for us on the front porch in a caned rocker, her rosary in her hands, her slightly crossed eyes looking more or less in our direction. Aunt Kate says one eye is looking at Heaven, but I have never been able to decide which one. There are two empty rockers next to Sister Elizabeth Anne, and we sit down in a row facing front, rocking and staring through the screen.

  The lessons are a special favor to Aunt Kate from Sister Elizabeth Anne, who went to school with Aunt Kate. Sandra Lee and I have already been confirmed after years of catechism, but this, in Aunt Kate’s opinion, is not enough insurance against the ever-present threat of heathenism.

  “ ‘Why did God make you?’ ”

  “ ‘God made me [rock] to know Him [rock] and to love Him [rock] and to serve him in this world [rock, rock] and to be happy with Him in the next [rock, rock, rock].’ ” I could say it backwards.

  “ ‘Who is God?’ ”

  “Uh [rock, rock] uh, ‘God is’ [rock] ‘God is the creator of ’ uh, [rock, rock] of uh, [nose twitching, lashes batting] uh . . .”

  “ ‘God is the creator of Heaven and’?”

  “ ‘God is the creator of Heaven and’ uh . . . [rock, rock] and uh . . .”

  “ ‘And earth and’?”

  “Uh, ‘and earth and’ uh . .

  “ ‘God is the creator of Heaven and earth and all things’!” I shouted.

  “You must let Sandra Lee have a turn,” Sister Elizabeth Anne said.

  After half an hour of rocking, uh-ing, and nose twitching, Sister Elizabeth Anne stood up, satisfied we knew the lesson. I tried to pretend I wasn’t in a hurry to leave and edged forward in my rocker slowly. Sandra Lee pretended she was having such a good time she hated to leave. Gazing up through her lashes and smiling shyly, she leaned back in the rocker and rocked forward on my toe.

  I leaped in the air, banging into Sister Elizabeth Anne. Something fell to the floor with a tinkling sound. Th
e silver heart that is supposed to hang from Sister Elizabeth Anne’s starched white scapula was lying at my feet.

  “An omen!” she cried, smiling at me. “Someday, perhaps, you will become a nun!”

  Sandra Lee piously crossed herself and said sweetly, “Amen!”

  I stared in horror at Sister Elizabeth Anne, draped in black, every hair on her head trapped inside a kind of religious helmet. Me, a nun? What about Edmond? My art? My mouth hung open while I silently prayed, Please, God, don’t make any mistakes about me. Let my secret life come true and let me develop and—and make Sandra Lee a nun.

  I forgot to say good-bye and thank you, and ran home.

  “Holly’s coming!” Nini said before I could get the screen door open. “And Tom says he took Pumpkin to the park. And ain’t it wonderful that Holly’s coming?” Usually, you can sit in Nini’s kitchen, thinking your own thoughts while she moves around singing “Pack Up Your Troubles” or some other World War song, but today, she couldn’t stop talking about her granddaughter from Chicago. She sipped her cafe au lait and nibbled at bread spread with cane syrup, her steady diet.

  “Wait till you see Holly! That’s some girl! Smart, just like you!”

  “Nini,” I asked, bored with Holly, who wasn’t coming for another week, “when my mother was growing up, was she like me?”

  “No,” she answered shortly.

  “Sandra Lee said she was quite a girl.”

  Nini looked at me sharply. “What she mean by that?”

  “I’m asking you what she means.”

  Nini’s dark eyes, matted in pure white and framed in her black face, took in all of me. “You just keep to your business,” she said. “Ain’t no use digging at the past.”

  “Well, I’d just like to be like her, that’s all, my own mother, and how can I be when you won’t tell me what she was like and I never knew her?”

  “How you ever gonna know her when she’s dead? You just aim to be like your Aunt Eveline, that’s what,” Nini said crossly.

  “Why?”

  “A happy woman, that’s why.”

  “I don’t think I want to be like Aunt Eveline,” I said carefully. “I am sure I will never wear lavender.”