Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  “If I worked here,” Dicey said finally, “there’s lots I could do.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “I mean, maybe after school for an hour, maybe Saturdays in the mornings.”

  “That wouldn’t be very long. So it wouldn’t cost me very much. I’d like the company,” Millie said. “How much were you thinking of me paying?”

  “A dollar an hour,” Dicey said. She was under age, so she couldn’t charge much.

  Millie thought about this, her fat sausage-shaped fingers working on the countertop.

  “I thought, if I worked four days a week after school, and then three hours on Saturday,” Dicey said.

  The fingers moved. “That would be seven dollars a week,” Millie announced. Dicey nodded. She figured, with seven dollars, she could give each of the little kids an allowance of a dollar a week and the rest to Gram. Except — now she changed that plan — she’d give herself an allowance too. They’d never had allowances. Momma never had any extra money at all to be able to count on to give them. So when they wanted paper or pencils for school, or shoelaces, they had to ask her, and her face got all worried until she figured out where to find the extra money.

  “I don’t know,” Millie said.

  “We could try it,” Dicey offered. “I could work for three weeks on trial. Then, if your business wasn’t getting better, you could fire me.”

  “I never fired anybody, I don’t know how,” Millie objected.

  “You see,” Dicey spoke urgently, “my theory is that your business will get better, and so instead of costing you money, I’d be making you money.”

  “Do you think so?” Millie asked.

  Dicey bit her lip and nodded. This was like talking to a bowl of Jello. Everything you said slipped in and jiggled the Jello, but it didn’t make any dents.

  “So you think it might work out that way?”

  Dicey nodded. Like a bowl of strawberry Jello, her least favorite kind.

  “Then maybe I should.”

  “I’ll start on Monday,” Dicey said quickly. “I’ll come in after school on Monday, so that’ll be about three fifteen I’ll be here.”

  “All right,” Millie said.

  Dicey left before the woman could change her mind. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t; her guess was that it would. In any case, she had the next three weeks taken care of. She was satisfied, she thought, riding seven miles back over flat, curving roads to her grandmother’s house. To our house, she corrected herself. But when she said our house she couldn’t help thinking about the cabin in Provincetown, up against the windy dunes; even though she knew that wasn’t their house any more.

  At dinner, she told everyone about her job. She looked mostly at Gram while she was telling, and thought the woman approved. “But aren’t you under age?” Gram asked her.

  “Yes, but Millie didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t even ask,” Dicey said.

  “That’s because she never had a thought in her head that somebody else didn’t put there for her,” Gram said.

  “You mean she’s stupid?” Sammy asked. He shoveled spaghetti into his mouth in long strands, because he was too hungry to practice winding it on a fork. He had spaghetti sauce all over his face.

  “You might say that,” Gram agreed. “What about school?” she asked Dicey.

  “School’s easy,” Dicey told her. “I won’t have any trouble in school.” At least, she wouldn’t have any trouble passing, unless it got so bad in the stupid home ec course they made her sign up for that she started cutting classes. “I thought” — she looked at James’s admiring face, and Sammy’s spaghetti decorated one, and Maybeth’s quiet one — “we should have allowances. A dollar a week,” she announced, pleased with herself.

  “Even me?” Sammy demanded.

  “Even you,” Dicey agreed.

  “Good-o,” Sammy said. “Even Gram?”

  Dicey met her grandmother’s eyes. She couldn’t tell, from the expressionless face, whether Gram was amused, or angry, or insulted. “Gram too, but Gram gets more. It’s only seven dollars a week, all together,” she apologized. “That would be only three dollars a week. And if her business doesn’t get better, after three weeks I’ll have to find something else.”

  “You could get some shoes,” Sammy told his grandmother. “You need to wear shoes when the weather gets cold.”

  Gram’s expression resolved itself into amusement.

  “Well, you do,” Sammy pressed on. Gram always wore bare feet, unless she was going into town, bare feet and a long skirt, with a blouse loose over it. She wore her clothes for comfort, she told the children.

  “I have shoes I wear in cold weather,” she told Sammy. “How do you think I lived so long? Not by going barefoot in cold weather.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Sammy complained. “How could I know? I thought it was a good idea.”

  “It was,” Dicey assured him. “So it’s all right?” she asked her grandmother.

  “If you’ve made the arrangements, it’ll have to be,” Gram said. “But I always thought, if you were a family, you talked over your plans first.”

  “And got permission,” James reminded Dicey.

  “Not permission,” Gram said, “just to check in.”

  Dicey bit back anger. She thought, she said to herself, she was doing something pretty smart and to help out too. Nobody said thank you, or anything.

  “I’m proud of Dicey,” Maybeth said softly.

  “Oh, so am I,” Gram said. “I think Dicey knows that. You get things done, girl, I’ve got to give you that.”

  “So do I,” Sammy said.

  “It’s what Tillermans do,” Dicey said, feeling better.

  “And I had something to talk over too,” Gram told them. “I’ve got an appointment down town next week, about getting welfare money”she said, as if the words tasted bitter. Then she added, “I thought I might as well talk to a lawyer and get advice and ask about adoption. If that’s what you want.”

  “But what about Momma?” Sammy asked.

  “Momma’s sick, you know that,” Dicey said quickly. “She can’t take care of us. She might get better, and she might not.”

  “The doctors think she won’t,” James added.

  Sammy had stopped eating. “Because she’s crazy sick?” he asked.

  Dicey nodded.

  “But how does she eat?” he demanded. “If she doesn’t eat she’ll die.”

  Dicey looked helplessly at her grandmother. “They have ways of feeding people, with tubes and special liquids,” Gram said. You could see Sammy thinking about this.

  “But if you adopted us and Momma came back —” he said to Gram.

  “Then we would put you and James into one bedroom, and your Momma would sleep where you’re sleeping,” Gram answered quickly, “because that was her room when she lived at home.” Dicey could have gotten up and hugged her grandmother, except that they never did that kind of thing, the Tillermans, hugging and kissing. “Or,” Gram said, “we might turn the dining room into a bedroom. We never use it and she would have more privacy.” Gram waited a minute for more questions, then nodded briskly. “That’s all taken care of then,” she said.

  “If you wanted to adopt us,” Dicey said, “I’d like that.”

  “And me,” Maybeth said. The boys, too, agreed.

  “It would be safer for us,” James explained. “We’d have legal status, and rights. But what about you?” he asked his grandmother.

  “Might be safer for me, too,” Gram said sharply. James looked at her, with sudden intensity, as if he wondered what she was thinking and suspected that it might be very interesting. But he didn’t say anything.

  Dicey and Maybeth washed up the dishes. Dicey hurried through them, but Maybeth lingered, humming. It was Momma’s song, about giving her love a cherry without any stone, and Dicey joined in. She was drying the forks and putting them away while Maybeth scrubbed down the wooden table. “How can there be a
baby with no cry-ing,” they sang. All of a sudden, Dicey remembered how the words to the last verse answered that question, and the other impossible questions the song asked. “That’s funny,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “The song. You just look at things another way and it all makes sense. When a chicken’s an egg, it doesn’t have bones. Isn’t that funny?”

  “I think it’s sad,” Maybeth said. “Anyway, the music is. Momma sang it sad.”

  Dicey didn’t know what to say, so she started the last verse.

  They worked at fractions. Maybeth’s class had done them last year, in second grade. Mrs. Jackson had told Maybeth she should understand fractions from one half to one eighth. Dicey figured that would be pretty simple. She took an apple and a knife and cut the apple in half. Then she cut it into quarters, then halved the quarters. Maybeth watched with big eyes. When Dicey wrote down the fractions and showed Maybeth the numbers one fourth and one eighth and asked her which was bigger, Maybeth pointed to one eighth.

  Dicey tried to explain. “That one up there doesn’t mean anything. I mean, it’s called the numerator and it tells you how many of the eight parts are there.”

  “I know,” Maybeth said, studying the numbers seriously. “Since the one is the same, the fraction with eight is bigger.”

  Dicey showed her on the apple pieces, but since she had to combine two of the eighths to make a quarter, Maybeth said the two was bigger than the one now.

  Dicey tried another aproach. “In fractions, the bigger the number in the denominator — that’s at the bottom — the smaller the fraction is.”

  “But how can that be?” Maybeth wondered.

  “Because you’re talking about parts, not the whole number. It’s different from the whole numbers.” Dicey felt frustrated. It was so clear in her own mind, and Maybeth just sat and looked at her, or at the apple pieces, or at the paper. Her eyes got bigger.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

  Dicey didn’t know what to do. “That’s OK,” she said. “They aren’t important.”

  “I’m supposed to know them,” Maybeth said.

  “We’ll try again,” Dicey said. “Some other time. I am going to eat an eighth,” she announced, popping the crisp apple slice into her mouth. She had done it wrong and she didn’t know how to do it right. She tried not to look as discouraged as she felt.

  Maybeth smiled at her. “And I’m eating a half,” she said, eating another eighth, one that had been set beside its equal to make a quarter.

  The rest of the family was in the living room. They had opened the windows to catch any suggestion of a breeze. Outside, the sun was setting and splashing the sky with colors. Maybeth went right to the battered upright piano and picked out the tune she had been singing in the kitchen. She searched for notes that harmonized with the melody lines. Dicey watched her for a while, trying to figure out how to explain about fractions. Maybeth’s back was straight. Her face was serious as she watched her fingers on the piano keys. After a while, she tried to add more harmony with notes played by her left hand.

  Gram and Sammy sat playing checkers, both of them barefooted, both concentrating on the board. They sneaked looks at one another’s faces, as if trying to see what the opponent was thinking of for his next move. When Sammy was doing something tricky, it showed on his face. His eyes danced while he waited for his grandmother to fall into his trap, as if he could barely keep his cleverness inside. Gram gave herself away by her mouth, Dicey decided, because it would get all stiff and straight. That way, you could tell she was hiding something, and all you had to do was look at the board to figure out what her scheme was. Dicey thought she’d like to play a game of checkers with Gram. She thought she could probably beat her.

  “King me,” Sammy ordered. Gram pointed out that he was still one move from the end of the board. “Momma used to,” Sammy argued. He was losing the game. His voice quivered.

  “If you’re going to play with me, you’re going to play by the rules,” Gram said. “You’re big enough, aren’t you, to play by the real rules.”

  Sammy didn’t want to say yes and he didn’t want to say no. When he saw the way Gram looked across at him, he didn’t say anything.

  Dicey went to stand behind James, who sat at the big wooden desk reading a thick book. He looked up over his shoulder at her and marked his place on the small print with a finger. “How long do you think it’ll take to get the boat fixed up?” Dicey asked him.

  “Not now, Dicey, I’m reading.”

  “What’re you reading?”

  “The Bible.”

  “Why?”

  James sighed. “Mr. Thomas said every educated man should. He said it’s one of the underpinnings of western civilization.” His face lit up. “Isn’t that an idea? Underpinnings of civilization? As if — civilization were a big building, you know? Besides, there are some good stories in the Bible.”

  “And besides,” Gram added in, “it was the fattest book on the shelves and James always likes to read the fattest ones.”

  “That’s not true,” James said.

  “Isn’t it,” Gram answered.

  “And besides,” James said, “if you have a big idea, you have to write it down in a big book, otherwise you won’t be able to explain all the complicated parts.”

  “Didn’t say there was anything wrong with what you were doing,” Gram remarked.

  The piano behind them played on, softly, through all this, as if Maybeth knew that everything was all right in the room.

  “And look at this, Dicey,” James said quietly. He turned the heavy pages back to the beginning. There was a long list of names and dates, in different handwritings. Some of the ink was so old it had turned brown. The list went all the way down one page and partway down the next.

  James’s finger pointed to an entry on the second page. John Tillerman md. Abigail, 1936, she read. Then there were three names, in a row, in the same handwriting, with dates of birth beside them: John Tillerman, Elizabeth Tillerman, Samuel Tillerman. By Samuel there were two dates, and the last date had been put in later, by a different hand. The same hand that put in a date of death for the first John Tillerman. Dicey touched Momma’s name there in the ink and pointed at Samuel’s name. “That’s Bullet, our uncle.”

  “He was only nineteen,” James pointed out. They were talking almost in a whisper.

  “It was a war,” Dicey explained.

  “Even so,” James said, “that’s still young. He was only six years older than you. Only nine older than me.”

  We should be written down too, Dicey thought. But maybe Gram didn’t want that.

  “I can hear what you’re thinking, girl,” her grandmother said. Dicey looked up, alarmed. “And you’re right,” Gram said. She got up, took James’s place at the desk, and pulled an old fountain pen out of the drawer. Slowly, she wrote down their names: Dicey Tillerman. James Tillerman. Maybeth Tillerman. Samuel Tillerman.

  They all looked at the names there. At last, Gram said, “That’s settled too.” She gave James back his seat.

  None of the children said anything. Dicey guessed that, like her, they couldn’t think of how to say all the things they were thinking. Finally, Sammy found words. “Good-o,” he declared.

  Gram smiled to herself and agreed to play another game of checkers with him. James went back to his reading, Maybeth back to the piano. For a while, Dicey watched them all.

  Then she wandered out of the room. She had nothing to do. Her homework she had finished quickly after school on Friday, just some math, and memorizing for science. There weren’t any chores she could think of. She decided to go outside.

  Outside was better than inside, Dicey always thought that. In Provincetown, where they had lived with their momma, they were always outside, on the dunes and down by the rushing water. Summertimes they would go out early in the morning and stay all day. The rooms in their little cabin were awfully small, especially with four children and one of them
Sammy, so they had spent all the time they could outside. But even here, in Gram’s house, with its big, boxy rooms, Dicey preferred outside. She liked the water. She liked the stretch of water leading before her and she liked the stretch of sky overhead.

  Dicey crossed the lawn at the back, went through the garden, and then headed down the narrow path through the tall marsh grasses. Overhead, the growing darkness turned the sky to the color of blueberries, and long clouds floated gray. The only movement Dicey could see in the Bay, when she sat dangling her feet over the end of the dock, was the turgid, slow sweeping of tide. She wiped sweat off her forehead. She looked out across the flat water. Just a band of burning orange was left from the sunset, but the water caught that and transformed it, lying before Dicey like a field of gold. Like cloth of gold.

  Dicey was feeling edgy and not really like herself. Probably, she told herself, it was all these changes that were permanent. The new home and the new school and Gram. But Dicey didn’t mind changes, she’d gotten used to them over the summer. For a minute, she unrolled the adventures of the summer out, like ribbons. The ribbons unrolled back until Dicey saw her momma’s face. But it wasn’t her momma’s own face she saw, it was the photograph the police in Bridgeport had shown her for identification, that faraway face lying back against a white pillow, with the golden hair cut short all around it.

  The sadness of Momma lost to them, maybe forever, was something Dicey carried around deep inside her all the time, and maybe that explained her edginess. Dicey wasn’t used to carrying sadness around. She was used to seeing trouble and doing something about it. She just didn’t know anything to do about Momma.

  What Dicey was used to, she realized, was things being simple, like a song. You sang the words and the melody straight through. That was the way she had brought her family down here to Crisfield, singing straight through.

  Gram probably knew something about carrying sorrow around. However she acted, Dicey knew Gram had cared about her three children who all left her and never came back. She wondered how Gram carried her sorrows. Maybe someday, when they had all got used to one another, she would ask.