by Abby Bardi
I sat on the sofa most of the afternoon with Heather, trying not to pay any attention to whatever she was watching on the television. Whenever Alice would come into the room, I would look up at her and wait for her to tell us to get on with our chores, or for Heather to do her homework or something, but she would just pass through the room with a look on her face like she was thinking and disappear for a while. Heather sat with her leg over the side of the armchair, flipping the channels back and forth on the television. A bunch of the channelshad people talking to large audiences about the strange things they had done, such as courting their sisters' husbands and stuff like that. I figured that nobody would ever do anything that terrible, and I couldn't understand how Heather could waste a whole day watching them as if they were real. Heather looked pretty bored too, and every so often she would say something to me about the people's clothes, or their hair, but apart from that, we just kept quiet, which was fine with me.
At about five o'clock, a man came in the front door. “Hi, Puff,” he said to Heather. I guessed that they called her Puff for some reason. He looked at me like he wasn't expecting to see anyone else, then said, “Oh, you must be—” He stopped, like he didn't know what my name was supposed to be.
“I'm Mary Fred,” I said, walking over to him and shaking his hand.
“This is my uncle Roy,” Heather said, waving her hand toward him but not looking up.
“Hi, Uncle Roy,” I said. I figured that was what I should call him too.
Uncle Roy was carrying a big plastic bag. He put it down on the floor and looked at me, like he was trying to see if I was someone he would like or not. He wasn't much taller than me, with sandy, wavy hair like Alice's, and a scraggly little beard. His hair was thinning in patches on top, like he'd been tearing it out. He had one big, dark eyebrow and dark eyes. “So, Mary Fred, tell us about yourself,” he said, walking into the room and sitting on the sofa across from the television.
“There's not much to tell. I guess I'll be here for a while. You probably know all the rest.”
“More or less.” I expected him to say his condolences like most people did, but he didn't. “Are you going to be a good influence on our Puffin here?”
“I don't know, Uncle Roy. I hope I'm always an influence for good.”
“Roy,” Alice said in a sharp voice, as she swung through the kitchen door, “are you already giving Mary Fred a hard time?”
“Not yet,” Roy said. “I was just working up to it. I hadn't even gotten started yet.”
“Give it a rest, Roy,” Alice said, sounding snappish. “Just take the day off from being you. Mary Fred, how would you like to help me in the kitchen?”
“I'd love to.” I jumped to my feet, relieved to have something to do besides not watch the stupid television shows or talk to Uncle Roy.
“Did you see that, Puffin?” Roy said to Heather. “That's how it's done. When someone asks you to do something, you respond in the affirmative. You don't just continue to sit like a lump with a hearing impairment, or scream like someone is disemboweling you.”
Heather seemed not to have noticed that Roy had even spoken. She was still flipping channels as I ran out of the room with Alice.
It turned out that Alice didn't really have any particular chores in mind for me, but I managed to find plenty to do. After I had washed the remaining cookie sheets, I sorted through the fridge and threw out some old food that was making it smell bad, while Alice poked around, looking for something to make for dinner. “I'm sorry, Mary Fred, I meant to go to the store and make you a special meal for your first night, but I just didn't have time. I brought work home today so I could be here for you, but it took longer than I thought, and I—”
“It's perfectly all right, ma'am,” I said, though I felt a little sad about not getting a special welcome dinner. Then I decidedwell, I'll help make dinner special for all of us one way or another.
“What do you like to eat?” Alice asked me. “Is there anything you don't like? Do you have any dietary restrictions?”
“No, I'll eat anything, ma'am. Though we tend to eat a lot of fish. Like the proverb says, If the child asks for a fish, give him a fish.”
“I'd never heard that,” Alice said. “I'll get some fish tomorrow, I promise. Let's see, what do we have for tonight?” She started rummaging around in the freezer and pulled out a bunch of plastic containers and old boxes until she found a big package of frozen lasagna. We put that in the oven and then I found a bunch of carrots in the fridge and grated them for a salad. I put a little yogurt on them and some honey and raisins, and I scooped the salad into a pretty flowered bowl I found in a low cabinet. Next I went into the dining room to set the table. There were stacks of books on it, so I had to move them first, but I managed to find all the right plates and silverware and some paper napkins, and pretty soon it looked nice. The lasagna had to cook for an hour, so I found a bunch of little things to do before dinner. I put all the clean dishes away, and I rearranged a couple of cabinets. I mopped part of the floor that had some sticky stuff on it, and I cleaned all the counters.
When we sat down to dinner, Heather said, “Why is everything so fancy?” She sounded grumpy.
“Puffin would rather eat out of a trough,” Roy said. “It's more efficient.”
“Mary Fred made everything nice,” Alice said. She smiled, and I could see that she was glad about how nice things were. She seemed like the kind of person who liked things to be calm and sweet and pretty, but from the looks of it, nothing in herlife was like that. I resolved to try to make things a little better for Alice, as part of my stay here.
“Great lasagna,” Roy said, digging in. “My compliments to the chef at Le Club de Price.”
“Try the carrot salad,” Alice said, pushing the flowered bowl toward him. “Mary Fred made that.” She smiled at me, and I felt almost happy for a second.
When I came downstairs the next morning, I was expecting to see everybody at the table already, since it was nearly eight when I finally got up. I'd been dreaming I was at the Compound and I was trying to feed the chickens, but every time I looked in the big cabinet in the barn where we kept their food, bats would fly out at me, or birds, or giant bees, and I don't think I ever did find the chickenfeed. The whole floor of the barn was mud, and as I walked across it, trying to get back to the big house, my feet stuck to the ground and I couldn't pull them up. I tried yelling for Papa but I knew nobody could hear me, and when I woke up, I was making little P sounds with my mouth, like I'd started to say Papa but hadn't quite finished.
But nobody was in the dining room when I got there, and when I looked in the kitchen, it was empty too. I opened the fridge to look for something to cook, but there weren't any eggs, and all the breakfast things I knew how to make had eggs in them. Finally, I went back out into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa to wait for Alice to get up. I watched the clock as I sat there, humming to myself. I hummed “Holy Sanctuary” and “Where Is the Word to Be Found.” I hummed until my throat started to hurt, and then I just sat there, thinking the music instead. At about ten, Alice came downstairs in a flowered bathrobe. Her eyes looked sleepy and her hair was standing up all around her head like she'd had a bad dream.“Oh, Mary Fred,” she said when she saw me, like she had totally forgotten I would be there.
“Good morning, ma'am,” I said.
“Did you help yourself to something to eat?” Alice asked. “I'm sorry, I forgot to show you where everything is.”
“I was waiting for everybody else,” I said.
“We never eat in the mornings,” Alice said. “I'm so sorry, Mary Fred, I should have said something last night. Let me get you some cereal.”
She stood there kind of twisting her hands together, like she felt really guilty for forgetting, so I said, “I never eat in the mornings either. It makes me kind of bilious.”
This seemed to make her feel better, and she stopped twisting her hands and said, “Are you sure I can't get you some cereal?”
“Not till at least ten o'clock,” I said. “I never eat before that.”
“I think it's ten o'clock right now,” Alice said, turning to look at the clock behind her. It was a big wooden clock, like the top half of a grandfather. “This clock is always ten minutes slow. It's really ten past ten.”
“Well then, I guess I should have something to eat,” I said, jumping up and following Alice into the kitchen. She showed me some boxes of cereal on a high shelf in the pantry. When I opened the first one, a moth flew out, so I went for the second one, which was something called Tropical Muesli. It tasted kind of strange, like it had perfume in it, but it was okay. Alice asked if I wanted any coffee. I said no, that I had never had coffee before and didn't know if it would agree with me, so she made herself some. She sat across from me at the dining room table drinking it while I ate my cereal. She looked too tired to talk, so I didn't try to make conversation with her, but she kept thinking of things to say like she was afraid of my getting too bored.
“Do you need to go shopping?” Alice asked. “Do you need anything? Socks, underwear? They give me a little allowance for you so I want to make sure you get everything you need.”
I didn't think I ought to discuss underwear with someone I had just met, but then again, she was supposed to be my family for a while, so I said, “I brought five pairs of underpants, and we generally do the laundry every other day so they ought to do just fine.” Then I thought maybe Alice didn't have a washing machine in her house, and that I had just said something rude, so I said, “Of course, I can wash them out in the sink,” but then I thought, well maybe people don't want people washing their dirty underwear out in sinks, where the germs might sit and wait for them, so I was about to say that I could change them every other day if necessary, but then I didn't want Alice to think I was dirty, so I just opened and closed my mouth a couple of times like a fish.
“Well, let me know if you need anything,” Alice said. “We can go shopping any time you want to. Clothes, makeup, whatever you need. . . .”
I had never worn makeup in my life, but I just said thanks.
After we finished breakfast, Alice went outside and got the newspaper from the front lawn, and she asked me if I wanted part of it. We had always made a point of never reading the newspaper, since it was all lies, but I didn't want to say that to Alice, so I looked at some of it. I read the comics and then a thing called a horoscope that seemed to be telling everybody what to do. Papa would say that that was how the government controlled people's minds, but it didn't sound like the horoscope was asking anyone to do anything bad. The advice for Aries was to wear mauve and green. I figured I'd watch all day for someone wearing mauve and green and then ask them if they were Aries.
“What's Aries?” I asked Alice, so I'd know.
“That's someone born anywhere from March 21 to April 20 or so. What sign are you, Mary Fred?”
“Sign?”
“When's your birthday?”
“December 14.”
“That makes you a Sagittarius. That's what I am too. Mine's December 10.”
“Well, then I guess we should look beyond the immediate and gain an overall view. Stress ability to make friend of one from foreign land. Question concerning marriage will loom large. Pisces plays dominant role.”
“Roy's a Pisces,” Alice said.
“Does this mean that when a person's birthday is tells them what they ought to do?”
“Sort of. Maybe. I don't know if it really means anything, Mary Fred, but some people believe in it.”
“Do you?”
“Not really. Maybe a little. I basically think we're responsible for our own destinies.”
Now, I knew better than to argue with this, because of course we're all in the hands of the One, but I understood that Lackers often thought that they were deciding things for themselves. Part of me wanted to try to convince Alice to follow the One and come with me into the Hereafter when the Big Cat came, but I had had enough experience with Lackers to know that they weren't going to listen, and that alls that would happen is they would want to discuss things. And Papa always said those things were best left alone. Lackers would hear when the lame walked and the blind received their sight, Papa said, and meanwhile, it was no use sowing a seed on barren ground. So I asked why they had the horoscopes in the newspaper.Alice said they were for entertainment. “Anyway,” she said, “you're too young for marriage to loom large.”
“Maybe it's someone else's marriage, though,” I said.
Alice shook her head and looked kind of sad.
“Maybe I'm the friend from a foreign land,” I said.
She looked at me and smiled. “I don't think Frederick County is a foreign land, do you?”
I smiled and said no, but the fact was, this place did seem like a foreign land to me, in fact, like a whole new planet.
We'd been sitting there for a while, reading the paper and not saying anything, when Heather came down. Her eyes were still almost closed, and she moved unsteadily, like she was sleepwalking. I had seen someone sleepwalking once at the Compound one night and he almost fell into the lake. The men had to holler and wake him. Heather waved a hand and lurched herself into a chair, looking at me like she was trying to remember who I was.
“Good morning, Heather,” I said. Heather made a little grunting sound, and Alice told her to say good morning back to me, so she did. I waited for Alice to jump up and ask Heather to help her get some breakfast, but she went on reading the paper. After a while, Heather picked herself out of the chair, went into the kitchen, and came back with a bag of potato chips.
“Don't eat potato chips for breakfast,” Alice said, glancing at Heather and then looking back at the paper.
I wasn't at all surprised when Heather went right on eating the potato chips as if her mother hadn't said anything. I was getting the hang of things.
It was just past noon when Roy came down the stairs. He was wearing a green T-shirt and blue jeans with holes in them, and he didn't look very clean. His hair was all messy and his beard looked even more scraggly than before. We were still sitting at the table. I had gone and taken a shower and thencleaned up some in the kitchen until Alice had made me stop. “It makes me feel guilty,” she said. “Just relax.” Of course I was used to relaxing, but we did it on Sunday afternoon after church. Papa always used to say, “Humankind is made for the Sabbath, not the Sabbath for humankind.”
“I left you some coffee,” Alice said as Roy went into the kitchen. The big wooden door swung closed behind him and then swung back open a minute later with him carrying a big clay mug that looked like it had been made by someone in kindergarten.
By this time, I knew he wasn't going to say good morning or anything, but I thought I'd have some fun with him so I said, “Good morning, Uncle Roy, did you sleep well?”
Roy nodded and took a big guzzle of coffee.
“I guess you're a morning person,” Alice said to me, smiling like the very thought of being a morning person made her feel tired all over again.
“I'm an all-day-long kind of person,” I said.
“Like the Energizer Bunny,” Heather said. It was the first thing she'd said so far today.
“The who?”
Heather looked at me sadly. “Mary Fred,” she said, “you're going to have to watch more TV.”
By midafternoon, I had already cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed the sitting room rug, which Heather would only let me do during commercials, and cleaned and rearranged the closet in my room. Alice was puttering around, watering plants (there were lots of plants everywhere, most of them brown and wilting), and stopping at the dining table to rest every so often. I thought about dusting, but Alice said she didn't have a feather duster, and some of the little stuff she had everywherewas too delicate for a rag, so I decided I would use some of the allowance she got for me to buy a feather duster when we went shopping.
“Mary Fred,” Alice said finally as I was beating the hearthrug on the back
porch, “really, you don't have to do any chores. We didn't have you come here so you could work.”
“I feel better when I keep busy,” I said.
“Oh,” Alice said, as if she suddenly remembered all about me. “I'm so sorry, Mary Fred. Of course you do. After all, you've been through so much. I should have thought of some kind of structured activity for you to do. I'm so used to Heather. She just kind of sits around all the time, so it didn't occur to me that you might need something more—” She broke off in the middle of a sentence and stood with her hand on her chin, like she was trying to think of something for me to do. Then she waved both hands in the air and said, “Don't worry, we'll think of something.”
“Until we do,” I said, “is it okay if I clean things?”
“Sure, Mary Fred. Of course. It's great, in fact, I really appreciate it.”
I had just finished scrubbing the bathroom floor when Alice asked if I wanted to go to the grocery store with her. I said sure, and we went to a store that was so big, you could have fit the Compound's general store into it about twenty-five times and still had room left over for all of the Apostles to do cartwheels. They had a gigantic fish counter, full of all kinds of big fish with the heads still on them, so Alice bought one for dinner. We bought some rice, and some green beans, and a lot of strange things that Alice said Heather liked—pink breakfast cereals, and rolls of tape that were made of fruit, and some frozen things with jelly and icing that were supposed to be strudel but didn't look like any strudel I'd ever seen.
“Is there anything I can buy you?” Alice asked me, her voice almost pleading. “Anything at all?”
“No, ma'am, I think I've got everything I need.” We had picked up the feather duster. “Maybe a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup to go with the green beans.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
