Secret City

by Julia Watts

  “Well, I probably wouldn’t be insulted, but I’ll take fifty cents an hour if you want to give it to me.”

  “This is wonderful,” Iris said. “I get some free time; you get some money. Can you think of anything better?”

  I couldn’t. I smiled that kind of foolish smile you get when something really good just falls into your lap, like Baby Sharon had fallen into mine. I hugged Sharon and breathed in her powdery baby smell, and the sound of Warren’s violin filled the house like the music in a movie about love.

  November 1, 1944

  Yesterday was my first day working for Iris. When I hit the front door, I could hear Baby Sharon squalling her head off. I had to knock several times to be heard.

  When Iris opened the door, she was smiling, but her jaw looked tight, like she was forcing it. “She’s in a mood today,” she said. “I’m tempted just to hand her to you and run.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, “as long as you come back sometime.” I stepped in the house and reached out and took Baby Sharon, who stopped crying instantly.

  “Magic,” Iris said. “You’re some kind of baby bewitcher.”

  “Babies like me,” I said. “Babies and animals. My papaw had a billy goat that used to follow me around like a puppy dog. If anybody else tried to get close to me, he’d butt ’em with his horns.”

  Iris laughed. “I bet your dad liked that goat. It probably kept your boyfriends from getting too friendly.”

  “I think the goat thought he was my boyfriend,” I said. “And he never had no competition.”

  “Really?” Iris said. “I thought you country girls started dating early.”

  “Not this country girl. What I want is an education.”

  “Good for you, Ruby.” Iris yawned. “You know what I really want?”

  “What?”

  “A nap.” She laughed, and so did I. “You know, I don’t think I’ve had one honest-to-goodness nap since I brought Sharon home from the hospital. I know a lot of mothers nap with their babies, but I’m afraid to. I’m such a sound sleeper I don’t know that I’d wake up if she needed me.”

  “Well, take you a nap, then. We’ll be fine.”

  “Thank you.” She grinned. “It’s kind of sad that my life is at a point where I can get so excited about a nap. If I’m not up by five, wake me. I need to start Warren’s dinner. I actually managed to acquire a tin of corned beef at the store this morning, after mowing down a few other housewives. I think I’ll make some corned beef and cabbage. Maybe the Irish blood in my veins will help me cook it without creating too much of a disaster.” She kissed Baby Sharon’s jowl. “Well…nighty-night.”

  I set Sharon in her playpen and used some blocks to prop up a hand mirror so she could see herself in it—an old trick I’d used with Baby Pearl. She looked at herself and laughed and gurgled.

  With Sharon happy, I decided to explore a little. Not to snoop, mind you—I wasn’t going to open any drawers or cabinets. I was just going to get a closer look at what was out in the open. And of course, the first place I went was the bookcase. It was big and long, made of nice, dark wood, and crammed full of books.

  Except for my library books and my sisters’ and my schoolbooks, the only book in our house was the family Bible, which was used to record birth and death dates and to hold newspaper clippings and pressed flowers, but wasn’t read much. This, though, was a full case of books like at the library. There were lots of scientific books which must have been Warren’s, and even though I made good grades in science, their titles might as well have been in Chinese for all I could make out about them. Then there was one shelf full of beautiful, leather-bound books with gold lettering spelling out the classic titles: Don Quixote, Great Expectations, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner. There were other novels, too, by Daphne DuMaurier and John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. The bottom shelves were taken up by a full set of the Encyclopedia Britanica. An idea popped into my head. What if I read some of the Encyclopedia Britannica every time I came over to babysit? How far could I get in it before Iris didn’t need me to watch Sharon anymore? I pulled out the first volume and read about aardvarks. I glanced at the playpen and saw that Baby Sharon had jabbered at her reflection until she talked herself to sleep. I sat down on the couch and got settled in with my aardvarks. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to sit in a comfy living room and read a book. I felt like a criminal—like I had broken into the Stevens’ house and was stealing money from them.

  When the clock on the mantel said five, I went to wake Iris. The bedroom door was open just a crack. I softly called her name through the opening, but she didn’t answer. Swinging open the bedroom door made me feel even more like a burglar. The parts of the bedroom floor that weren’t stacked with books were piled with laundry. Iris lay in the middle of the bed, snuggled under the covers, her face resting on her hands. Her long eyelashes were fanned out over her cheeks, and her lips were parted. Like all pretty people, she was even prettier while she was sleeping. She looked sweet and peaceful, like a child instead of a mother, and I couldn’t bring myself to wake her.

  I decided I would start supper myself. The head of cabbage, the can of corned beef, and three potatoes were sitting on the kitchen counter. I poked around till I found the knife drawer and peeled the potatoes and chopped the cabbage into bite-sized pieces. I poked around some more until I found a couple of pans. I set the pans on the eyes of the stove but then realized I had absolutely no idea how the stove worked. The only stoves I’d used got hot because you lit a fire in their bellies, but this one had complicated knobs and dials. I got down on my knees to look at them better. If I turned the wrong knob, I wondered, would I blow up the house?

  “Ruby, what are you doing?” Iris was standing in the doorway. Her hair and clothes were a little mussed from sleeping, and she was barefoot. Her toenails were painted red.

  “I was gonna start supper for you, but I can’t figure out how this new-fangled stove works.”

  She laughed. “You don’t have to do the cooking. But I will show you how to use the stove. You might need it to heat up Sharon’s formula one day. Plus, you’ll need to know how this new-fangled kitchen stuff works for when you get married.”

  “Which’ll happen about the time pigs fly,” I said.

  Iris patted my arm. “It’ll happen sooner than you think. Why, it doesn’t seem any time at all since I was your age.” She turned one dial, then another, and a ring of blue flames burned around the pan on the stove. “And now here I am with a house and a husband and a baby.” She shook her head. “But it’s not bad. You’ll see. Marriage has its moments.”

  Baby Sharon wailed in her playpen. “She’s probably hungry,” Iris said. She looked at the pans on the stove that needed tending, then in the direction of the playpen.

  “I can feed her while you cook,” I said.

  “Oh, could you? I can mix up some cereal for her if you can get her in her high chair.”

  Once Baby Sharon figured out she was going to eat, she calmed down considerably. I tied a bib around her neck and started spooning oatmeal into her wide open mouth.

  “I told you I needed an extra pair of arms,” Iris said, stirring the cabbage. “Oh, I meant to ask you…have you started A Tree Grows in Brooklyn yet?”

  I used the spoon to scrape a plop of oatmeal from Baby Sharon’s chin. “I’m about halfway through it, and Iris, I hate to admit it, but I judged that book by its cover, just like they say you ain’t supposed to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I just thought it wasn’t gonna be interesting. A book about a tree growing don’t sound interesting, you know? It sounds like watching the grass grow or something. And then there was the writer’s name. Lady writers usually have these beautiful, fancy names like Charlotte Bronte or Daphne du Maurier.”

  Iris laughed. “And she’s just plain old Betty Smith.”

  “Exactly. Betty Smith sounds like your old aunt, not like somebody who’d write a book. But you know, once I gave t
hat book a chance…well, it may just be the best thing I’ve ever read.”

  “It’s a good book.”

  “It is. And what makes it good is that it’s honest. It might be a made-up story, but it feels real. It felt a lot like my life, really. I mean, my family ain’t Irish Catholics in Brooklyn, and we ain’t as bad off as the family in the book because my daddy ain’t a drunk. But the way they have to work so hard and the way Francie loves to read but has to work to help her family…”

  “She’s a lot like you, isn’t she?” Iris said.

  “She is.” I didn’t tell her that like Francie, I had started writing about my life, too. “And I didn’t know anybody would write a book about somebody like me. And even if somebody did write it, I wouldn’t have thought anybody would want to read it.”

  “Well, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn isn’t showing any signs of falling off the New York Times best seller list,” Iris said. “So clearly some people want to read stories that aren’t about mansions and moors and tortured love. If there are any books you want to borrow from our shelves, by the way, feel free to grab them before you go. You can think of our home as a second lending library.”

  The word “go” made me realize it was getting to be time for my own supper. I didn’t want to leave, though. “Thank you,” I said. “I might borrow something once I finish with Francie.” I used Sharon’s bib to wipe the oatmeal off her face. “I reckon I’d better go eat my own supper,” I said. “Hopefully I’ll do a neater job of it than Sharon here.”

  Iris reached into the cookie jar which, I had learned, was for cash instead of cookies. “Well, Ruby, you’ve let me have a nap and an actual adult conversation. You’ve definitely earned your money today.”

  * * *

  On the way down Snob Hill, I kept passing little kids. One was covered in a sheet. One had his face blacked with cork to look like a beard and was wearing a beat-up hat and carrying a kerchief on a stick. Another had on a mask like the Lone Ranger. I was confused for a minute, then I remembered what day it was and that trick-or-treating was something town kids did. We had always lived too far out in the country for trick-or-treating.

  Mama was getting supper on the table when I got home. “Sorry I’m late,” I said, then I took the money out of my skirt pocket and gave it to Daddy, who was sitting at the head of the table.

  “Well, look at that,” he said, grinning. “You’re a wage earner now—that’s something to be right proud of. This money’ll be a big help to your mama and me.”

  After we’d mopped up our plates, I said, “Mama, Daddy, there’s a bunch of kids out trick-or-treating tonight. You reckon I can take the girls?”

  Garnet and Baby Pearl started saying, “Can we? Can we?” right away. Opal didn’t say anything, probably because she’s old enough to know that saying “Can we? Can we?” over and over again doesn’t do anything but get on your parents’ nerves.

  “We don’t go door to door begging for food in this family,” Mama said.

  “It ain’t begging,” Daddy said. “It’s more like a game.”

  “Well, it’s a no-count game,” Mama said. “This family made it through the Depression without begging. We ain’t gonna start now.”

  “Aw, please…” Baby Pearl started to whine.

  “I’ll tell you’uns what,” Daddy said, clapping his hands. “Ruby and Opal, you go fetch us some water.”

  “What for?” Opal said.

  “Cause I said so, that’s what for,” Daddy said. “Take both buckets, and be quick.”

  Opal complained all the way to the wash house and back. “We never get to go nowhere or do nothing,” she said.

  “That ain’t true. You just got to go to the wash house,” I said. But the look on her face said she didn’t think I was funny.

  When we got to the house with the water, Daddy pointed to our big metal washtub and said, “Pour it in there.” We did, and then Daddy pulled a big paper sack form behind his back and turned it upside down into the tub. Shiny red apples tumbled out and splashed into the water.

  We bobbed for apples and laughed like idiots. Afterward, while we crunched our apples by the stove, Daddy told the story of Ol’ Rawhide and Bloody Bones that used to scare the living daylights out of me when I was little. I guess I wasn’t the only kid that story scared, though, because when it was time to sleep, Garnet and Baby Pearl ended up in bed with me. I guess they figured if I’d survived sixteen years without getting eaten by Ol’ Rawhide and Bloody Bones, then they liked my chances of being able to keep them safe.

  November 3, 1944

  Today in biology class, Mr. Harris made us number off and pair up with partners. My partner was a scrawny red-headed girl whose face was as full of freckles as the sky is full of stars.

  “Hey,” she said, with a mountain accent even thicker than mine, “you live out at Happy Valley, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “My name’s Ruby.”

  She shot out a long, freckled hand for me to shake. “I’m Virgie West from West Virginia.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Wish I was.” Her grin showed a neat row of teeth so tiny they could’ve been baby teeth. “My daddy told ’em what to write on my birth certificate before Mama came out of the ether. She like to killed him when she woke up.”

  On the counter in front of us Mr. Harris set a glass mason jar with a fat green bullfrog in it. Next to the jar he set down a strip of white cloth soaked in something that stank to high heaven. “Do not open the jar yet,” he said. “Await further instruction.” Then he moved on and said the same thing to the next pair of kids and the next. Mr. Harris always talks fancy like that; he went to Harvard or Yale or one of those places. But smart as he is, the poor man still looks like a polecat.

  “Now,” Mr. Harris said, once all the jars were passed out. “Open the lid of the jar, being very careful not to let the frog escape. Drop the cloth in the jar, and then tightly screw back the lid.”

  But of course, one of the frogs did escape. It jumped right out of this blonde girl’s jar, and she screamed like it was going to kill us all. It jumped off the counter and clear across the room. “I didn’t know we was in Calaveras County,” I said, thinking about a story I read one time.

  “Huh?” Virgie said.

  “Nothing.” That’s one reason I keep to myself. I tend to say things that make sense only to me.

  I watched an overgrown boy in overalls catch the frog and stuff it back in the jar. The blonde girl—who, judging from her store-bought clothes, probably lived on Snob Hill—looked at the boy with about as much disgust as she’d looked at the frog.

  “How ’bout I open the jar lid and you drop the cloth in right fast?” Virgie said.

  She opened the jar lid just enough for me to slip in the cloth. She screwed the lid back on and set the jar on the counter. Nothing happened at first, but then as the fumes filled up the jar, the frog began to twitch and jerk. After a while he stopped twitching. I felt sick.

  I must’ve looked sick, too, because Virgie said, “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t get over how still the frog was. “I just feel sorry for the little feller is all.”

  “Shoot,” Virgie said, “that was nothin. You ever been frog gigging? Now that’s gotta hurt. This little feller never knew what hit him.”

  “You may open the jars and dissect the frogs according to the instructions in your manual,” Mr. Harris said.

  A lot of the girls didn’t want to touch the frogs, but Virgie grabbed ours and splayed him out on the tray Mr. Harris had provided. “You wanna cut him open, or you want me to do it?”

  “You go on,” I said.

  She picked up the blade and sliced down the frog’s chest and belly, then across on each side, making flaps of skin that opened like a saloon’s double doors in a Western. I still felt sick, but once I saw the frog’s insides, I was interested, too: the tiny heart, the little lungs, how everything nestled together in
that small space to make what had been seconds earlier, a living, breathing creature.

  When the bell rang, Virgie said, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. It beat sitting around with our noses in a book for an hour.”

  I would’ve rather had my nose in a book, but I didn’t say anything.

  As we passed Mr. Harris’s desk, Virgie said, “You ort to take some of them frog legs home with you, teacher. Them’s some good eating.”

  Mr. Harris massaged the bridge of his nose and muttered, “Sometimes I have to remind myself why I came to Tennessee.”

  “Say,” Virgie said, once we were out in the hall. “You want to sit with me on the bus today?”

  “All right,” I said, surprised that she’d asked me.

  After the final bell rang, I found Virgie outside the building with a lanky red-headed boy wearing faded dungarees that were too short for his long legs. “Ruby, this is my brother Aaron,” Virgie said. “Mama learned her lesson when she had him and come out of the ether to name him herself.”

  “Hey,” Aaron said without really looking at me.

  I said hey back, but after that Virgie seemed happy to do the talking for all of us. After we took our seats on the bus, she said, “You like to go to the show?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “when there’s something good on.”

  “Shoot, it’s all good to me. As along as the pictures move, I’m happy. You wanna go to the show sometime?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What else do you like to do?” she asked.

  “I like to go to the library,” I said.

  “The libary?” Like a lot of country folks, she didn’t pronounce the first “r” in the word. “What for?”

  “I like to read.”

  “Shoot, no point in getting eyestrain looking at those little-bitty words when you can look at them nice big pictures up on the movie screen. Say…I roll bandages over at the Red Cross on Wednesdays after school. You wanna come with me?”

  “Sure.” I decided I’d be friends with Virgie even though we probably didn’t have much in common. She was so easygoing and happy it was impossible not to like her, even if you could hardly get a word in edgewise.