Wasn’t she like a little doll?
Rosalie closed her eyes, and the lady beside her in the pink dress disappeared. The station disappeared. Inside her head a doll danced.
* * *
The Christmas morning of Rosalie’s eleventh year had begun at dawn like every other morning she had ever known.
“You girls get up in here,” her mother, Virgie, stood at the bedroom door and called.
Rosalie rolled over into the still-sleeping body of her sister Lucille, who groaned and then, “Phewy,” Lucille wrinkled her nose in disgust. Nancy, the third and youngest sister in the bed, had wet again, as she did almost every night.
Esther, Janey and Florence were still tangled together like puppies in the other cast-iron double bed in the square unpainted room.
“I’m not telling you girls again,” Virgie said. “Get up now. There’s chores to be done.”
Rosalie fought her way out from between her sisters and slipped her white cotton shift and then her blue cotton dress over her head. The little pink sprigs that had blossomed over the fabric when she’d cut it out six months ago from a flour sack had faded through its many scrubbings in the big iron pot in the side yard. She pulled on a sweater that her older sister Esther had crocheted and then outgrown and passed down to her. She was still cold, as was the fireplace, last night’s carefully banked fire having died hours ago. But she wouldn’t be cold for long, once she took her place in the kitchen at the wood-stove and began her morning chores.
“You better get those biscuits started now,” Virgie said, pushing the flour sack toward her. “Your pa and the boys have already been up an hour. They’re going to be back in here soon.”
Rosalie nodded “Yes’m” and began cutting lard into the flour with two knives. She worked carefully and quickly as Virgie had taught her, handling the mixture as little as possible once she’d added the fresh milk from the pail that her father had already left on the back steps. It hadn’t taken but one slap from the side of her mother’s hand when she was careless and made tough biscuits to teach her the technique. Flour and lard, like everything else on the Norris farm, were too hard-earned to waste.
Rosalie tested the oven of the woodstove with her hand and slipped the first pan of biscuits inside. There would be three before she was finished. Her five brothers and her father would polish off the first two, dabbed with butter her mother had churned and sweet honey gathered from their hives. Afterward the menfolk would wipe their mouths on the backs of their hands, scrape their chairs back from the table and clomp back out the kitchen door to finish their morning work in the barn.
Only then would the girls clear away their debris from the big round table, scrape and wash the dishes in the pot of water that was always at the boil on the back of the black-and-silver stove, dry them and reset the table for their own breakfasts. Only then would Rosalie pull the third pan of biscuits from the oven, and the girls would settle down for a few minutes to eat while their mother, at her place closest to the door, drank a cup of boiled coffee while she nursed the baby.
“They’ve tracked in again,” Virgie nodded at the bare wooden floor.
“Yes’m,” said Janey and Florence. It was the two middle girls’ job to scrub the floor clean with lye which bleached the pine pale as wild spring dogwood blossoms. What it did to their hands was another matter, but country girls couldn’t worry about niceties like soft skin. They couldn’t afford to.
Luxuries of even the most meager kind were unheard of in Virgie and William Norris’s wide-hipped house set on top of a hill well back from the dirt road which led to the hamlet of Sweetwell four miles away. The acres surrounding the farm where William and his family planted cotton every spring were fertile, repaying with bountiful crops the backbreaking, finger- splitting labor of seeding, chopping, hoeing and picking—those years it didn’t rain too much or too little and the boll weevil didn’t come to dinner.
It was pretty country, northwestern Louisiana, green all the way to the nearby border where the piney lands of Texas began. A few miles south was the Cane River, with magnolia-lined plantation lands rolling back from its banks. The three-storied big white houses along the Cane, layered and decorated and sweet like wedding cakes, were so pretty they could break your heart.
But there was nothing but backs to be broken on the thousands of small farms like the Norris place, where the never-ending work spread itself out to fill all the days from sunup to sundown, and the more children there were to do the work, the more mouths there were to feed, and the more store-bought shoes to purchase, the more disappointments to worry about at Christmastime.
Virgie Norris plopped the baby, Will, down for a few moments and pushed her curling dark hair back from her damp forehead. Breakfast done, it was time to start dinner. The carcasses of three chickens lay before her on the countertop, chickens she’d raised from biddies, fed and, just this morning, before the girls got up, wrung the necks of. She’d had Esther scald, pluck and gut them outside the kitchen door. It was cold out, but the smell of the hot wet feathers had upset her stomach ever since Will was born.
She wondered if there was something wrong with her insides. What could she expect, twelve children in fourteen years. The childbearing hardly ever gave her innards time to take care of themselves.
She wished she could do more for her babies, all of them. She’d always wanted their lives to be better, but it looked like they were going to be just the same as hers, her parents’ and their parents’ before them. As long as any of her kin had ever been able to trace their family histories back, telling the long looping and relooping tales while they sat by the fire at night, stories full of great-grand-aunts and second cousins once removed, they had always worked the land, and they had always been poor.
Too poor, she imagined, to ever buy all their children what they’d like to, or even just something, for Christmas.
She glanced up from the chickens she was cutting into frying pieces, a special treat for Christmas dinner, three chickens for the twelve of them not counting the baby, and looked at the tree standing in the corner. The children had decorated it the night before with popcorn, bits of bright ribbon, and the few precious glass ornaments her mother had passed down to her. At the top was a tin star William had brought her from Shreveport so many years ago she could hardly remember, a present when they were courting.
Beneath the tree was one present for each child, wrapped in newspaper: a new pair of work boots, a sweater she’d knitted, a shift with tiny rosebuds she’d embroidered around the scooped neck, all necessities, with one exception. This was the year that Rosalie would get her doll.
The children knew better than to expect much, but each year there would be something special for one of them. At first the treats had been in descending order from the oldest, but then there had been the year that Virginia, her namesake, had taken ill and they’d known that she wasn’t going to make it through the winter. So an older child had been skipped over and Virginia’d gotten the tin-backed mirror that she’d begged for. She’d lain in bed for many an hour, inspecting her pale face and watching herself braid her long red hair. Virgie had thought it a foolish gesture, but the children had all insisted that the mirror be buried with Virginia when she died.
After that, the order had gotten all cattywampus. The next year Lester had taken ill, and so he’d gotten his coveted basketball, but he’d made it through, praise the Lord, though sometimes Virgie regretted the present as the slap slap slap of it against the house threatened to drive her to distraction.
What with one illness and another, Rosalie had been passed over. Virgie knew that the child understood, but it didn’t stop the tears of disappointment from welling in her eyes when the presents were all opened and once again hers was a pair of underdrawers or a new apron. Because Virgie knew that more than anything in the world Rosalie had always wanted a real doll.
She had seen the very doll of her dreams last fall in a store window in Natchitoches, the day William ha
d loaded all the children into the wagon behind two mules for the trip for the Natchitoches Parish Fair. In the late afternoon, after a day filled with the wonders of the Snake Lady in her bespangled costume that made the boys gape and the girls avert their faces, caramel corn balls and meat pies bought with pennies saved all year, and the row after row of jars of prize golden peaches and bright red tomatoes, the hot dusty children had piled back into the wagon with Virgie and William to shop in Natchitoches for those store-bought items that couldn’t be purchased in Sweetwell.
There, in the cool dark Kendall’s Mercantile Store, while Virgie chose from the spools of thread and considered new needles for her treadle sewing machine, Rosalie saw the doll.
It was perched on the counter, out of her reach, but she wouldn’t have touched it anyway. She wouldn’t have dared.
The doll was like something out of a fairy tale, like Cinderella dressed for the ball. Its hair, real human hair, was like spun gold, parted down the middle and then twisted into a high knot atop her delicate head. A silver veil of the finest netting crowned the yellow curls. Her face was of porcelain, tinted blush pink at the cheeks and a rosier hue on her sweetly bowed lips. But the rest of the face was left its natural china white, and light seemed to shine through it, opalescent in the dim store. Her eyes were bright blue, with long fringed lashes that looked as if they had been dusted with gold. Beneath her slender neck began her dress of pale-blue taffeta, marked with what looked like rivulets of water. Virgie had once told her that the fabric was moiré, a kind of silk from France. Close upon her neck was a ruff of creamy lace. Below it marched a row of pearl buttons, tiny as seeds, down her slightly swelling bosom, ending at her wasplike waist. The sleeves of the dress belled out from the shoulder and then grew tight from the elbow down to her tiny wrists, where lacy trim matched that of the ruff. The skirt was full to the ankles, and just below the hem of it her delicate porcelain feet were enclosed in tiny black kid slippers. She was the most beautiful thing Rosalie had ever seen, beyond imagining.
Virgie had heard her daughter’s sharp intake of breath and turned to see her staring, as round-eyed as the doll. Virgie’s lips had tightened. Anger rose in her breast. She knew she ought to feel pity or sadness, but it was always anger that surged like bile when the children wanted something that they couldn’t have. Their wanting and the naked hunger in their eyes made her ashamed to be a country hick standing in a city store with her passel of children strung out behind her like biddy chickens.
She reached down and jerked Rosalie closer to her.
“Don’t you dare touch,” she said.
“Ma, I was just looking at her.” Rosalie’s cheeks burned hot. She knew that everyone in the store must be staring.
“There’s no point in wishing, girl. Your daddy works too hard for you to be having fancy ideas about things like that.”
Rosalie ducked her head. She’d get a whipping, she knew, if her mother saw her quick tears; she’d get something to cry about, all right. She turned and walked slowly, but not smartlike to make her mother angrier, out of the cool darkness of the store and across the wooden sidewalk back to the wagon, which was tied up outside on the town square. She climbed back in and sat beside Esther.
“What’s the matter, Ro? You look mad enough to spit.”
“Nothing.” Rosalie shook her head. Esther shrugged.
But something was wrong, Rosalie thought. Something was wrong when you couldn’t even look at a doll and dream.
A few weeks later as Virgie and William whispered late into the night in their bed, making Christmas plans, Virgie brought the doll up to her husband.
“We skipped her, you know,” she said to the long lanky man who had lain beside her more than half of her thirty-eight years. “If we don’t get it for her this year, it’ll probably be too late. She’ll come into her womanhood soon and be too old for dolls.”
“Virg!” William shushed her. Though he had fathered all of their twelve children right on this very mattress and had never seemed shy about that, he was uncomfortable at any mention of what he called “women’s business.”
“Well, I wish you’d think about it.” Virgie snuggled closer to him, but not too close. She didn’t want to even think about risking another baby so soon.
“It’s a lot of money, Virg.”
“I know.” She rolled over and let it drop.
But a few Saturdays later, without saying a word more about it, he’d ridden into Natchitoches and on his return pressed a newspaper-wrapped bundle into Virgie’s hand. She could tell from the shape of it that it was the doll.
Now it lay among the clutter of the other packages under the Christmas tree. Virgie couldn’t wait for her family to finish dinner so they could open their presents and she could see the expression on Ro’s face.
Now there it was. As the skinny little girl in her faded blue flour-sack dress slowly unwound the string and then unwrapped the paper, she raised her wide hazel eyes from the doll’s long blue watered silk, her mouth a perfect O.
She gazed first at Virgie, then at William, then back to the doll again, shaking her head over and over.
“Momma, Pa,” she cried, racing into their open arms and crushing her thin chest against theirs, but carefully holding her treasure to one side.
“It’s all right, Ro,” Virgie whispered into her ear. “Merry Christmas.”
The Norris boys expressed little interest in her special present, disappearing into their room to try on new denim overalls, socks and coats of sensible navy wool, but the girls all gathered round.
“Look,” said little Nancy as Rosalie lowered the doll’s head, “her eyes close.” They did indeed. Rosalie held her breath. Were their brilliant blue lost somewhere in her head forever? But no, when she lifted the doll perpendicular, there they were again.
The doll’s jointed head moved, too. “Careful,” Virgie cautioned. “Not too far.” The arms, the legs moved, and the doll could even bend over at her tiny waist.
“Does she have drawers?” Janey whispered. Rosalie wiped her hand on her lap and carefully lifted the hem of the doll’s dress to see lace-trimmed pantaloons.
Esther asked, “What are you going to call her?”
“Gloria,” Rosalie answered without skipping a beat. She’d known the doll’s name the first time she’d laid eyes on her in Kendall’s Mercantile Store.
“Like morning glory, blue morning glory?” Lucille always seemed to know what was going on in Rosalie’s head.
“Yes. And Gloria in excelsis Deo. From the hymn at church.”
Virgie snorted, “Lord, Lord. Put her away now. Girls, come on. Let’s get this table cleared.”
For the rest of the day, Rosalie was on a cloud. She did her chores as always, taking her turn changing the baby and the other little ones, carrying water from the well, filling the big iron pot on the back of the stove, gathering eggs from under the hateful pecking hens, carrying in pails of foaming milk from the evening milking. But every chance she got, she slipped back into the girls’ room and sneaked a look at Gloria, her blue eyes closed, asleep in a nest fashioned of an old baby quilt atop the chifforobe.
That night, after a supper of leftovers which had sat all afternoon on the table covered over with a clean tablecloth, she brought Gloria back into the kitchen to play with her while the family sat around the evening fire.
“Can I hold her?” Florence asked.
Rosalie hesitated, but Virgie caught her eye. Even if Gloria was hers, she had to share.
“Here.” She handed the doll over. “But be careful.”
Florence was careful, as were Esther, Janey, Lucille and even little Nancy. When Gloria had made the circle and was safely back in her arms, Rosalie sighed with relief.
Then, “What about me?” asked the gruff voice, still changing, of her older brother England. “Can I see the dolly, too?” He stepped forward, holding out his big rough hands.
Rosalie looked from his hands to Gloria to the eyes of her mother. S
he found no help there. Nor in the half-closed eyes of her father, leaned back in his rocking chair enjoying his pipe, a pleasure reserved for special occasions.
“He won’t hurt your dolly, Rosalie,” Virgie said.
But England’s sooty hands, never really clean in the cracks from his dirty work of smithing and shoeing, would snag and stain the fragile blue silk of Gloria’s dress. But she’d just have to bear it.
“Well, isn’t she a beauty. Look at that complexion. Bet she never hoed a row of cotton in her life,” he teased and smiled into Rosalie’s eyes. He held Gloria up and twirled her skirt, and, in the twirling, something caught, and she fell.
The porcelain smashed into a hundred little petal pink-and-white pieces, shining in the firelight.
Gloria’s soft body was intact, but her head, her hands and her feet were broken, as was Rosalie’s heart.
It didn’t matter that England was sorry. It didn’t matter when Virgie made her a rag doll to fill the blue silk dress. The beautiful Gloria was gone before Rosalie had had a chance to love her.
And Rosalie knew that that was the way of the world. It didn’t do to want too much, to expect anything, she told herself when she’d finished with the mourning and the crying herself to sleep at night. Life was hard and painful, and she was poor, and that was the way it was always going to be. But life would be less bitter if she didn’t expect it to be sweet.
* * *
That didn’t mean that she had to spend the rest of her life on the farm, though. She was willing to work hard, to do anything, but Rosalie didn’t want to spend all her days like her mother—washing, cleaning, cooking, tending after a whole mess of kids. The only way she could see to escape was to use her brains. Her teachers had always said she had plenty. There had to be a way they could earn her a living.
But when she finished the eleventh grade, where was she going to get the money to go on? It cost over four hundred dollars for the two years of normal school in Natchitoches.
Her brother England stepped forward. “I’ll lend it to you.” How would he scrape together the money from the few pennies he had earned on his small farm near home? But she was his favorite, and he’d always been a good boy.
Keeping Secrets Page 5
