Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  Dicey nodded and stared. She was pleased to have this girl for a partner, but she wondered at the buzzings of conversation around them, and she wondered if Mina had felt sorry for her, the new kid, and that was why she chose Dicey.

  “We’re the smartest ones in here,” Mina said, lowering her voice so that nobody would hear. She smiled at Dicey, and her teeth flashed white and her round cheeks got rounder. Her skin was smooth and milk-chocolate brown. Her hands, arranging things on the table top, were large and quick.

  “How do you know that?” Dicey asked.

  “I know about me,” Mina answered, “and I’ve been keeping an eye on you. Don’t worry, I won’t eat you,” she told Dicey, grinning.

  Dicey looked at the girl, grinned back at her. Did she think that just because Dicey was scrawny and small, and she was so large and strong-looking, that Dicey would be scared of her?

  “I’m not worried,” Dicey said. If Mina knew the kind of things Dicey had done all her life and especially last summer, she wouldn’t think Dicey could be scared. The teacher called the class to attention and began to dictate the background information.

  At the end of that day, Dicey came home to see three boy’s shirts lying on the kitchen table. They didn’t look new. When Gram and Sammy came in, Dicey asked about them: “Where’d you get these?”

  “From the attic,” Gram said. Dicey drank a glass of cold milk and picked up the top shirt. It was plain white cotton, with a collar that buttoned down.

  “I didn’t know you had an attic,” she remarked.

  “They’re for you; I altered them to fit,” Gram said. “You’re too old for T-shirts, and it may be weeks before we see any money from the Welfare Office.”

  “I didn’t know you could sew,” Dicey said. For her? She unfolded the shirt and touched the material. It had been worn down soft. She could see tucks along the sides, where it had been recently stitched.

  “I’ve got an old treadle machine in my room,” Gram said. “Aren’t you going to try it on?”

  Dicey peeled off her T-shirt and put on the boy’s shirt. She buttoned it up, until the top button, which she left open. She pulled the sleeves straight and buttoned the wrists. It felt good, cool and cottony, freshly ironed. Gram watched her and nodded her head. Dicey tucked the shirt in at the waist of her cutoffs. Looking down, she saw that her bosom pushed the front of the shirt out a little. She quickly pulled it out again, so it would hang loose.

  “Thank you,” she said. There was a white shirt and two blue ones. She didn’t know what more she was supposed to say, although she felt like there was more to say. She wanted to ask whose shirts these had been.

  “It suits you,” Gram said.

  James agreed, when he came in later. “Much better than the T-shirts,” he approved. “Is the attic that trap door upstairs in the ceiling?”

  Gram nodded.

  What’s up there?” James asked.

  “Nothing much.”

  James stared at his grandmother. Then he decided not to pester her. “I got a job,” he announced.

  “You what? How did you do that?” Dicey demanded. She had never thought of James getting a job.

  “There’s a kid in my class, he had a newspaper route for Baltimore and Annapolis papers. He was griping about it and I said I’d do it. It gets him twelve dollars a month,” James said.

  He looked at Dicey and then at Gram. Neither of them said anything.

  “It’s OK,” he explained to Gram. “I haven’t told him yes for sure yet, I said I had to check with my family.”

  James was always the one who did things right, Dicey thought. She wished that he would make some mistakes, just once or twice. He did make mistakes, she knew that, but he always seemed to be the one the grown-ups approved of.

  Sammy came bowling into the room and ran smack into Dicey. She wheeled around, ready to yell at him. His eyes were already angry, she noticed, and his color was high.

  “I rode a mile as fast as I could, all the way,” he declared. “I’m not even tired. So I’ll help James.” Gram smiled at him and kept herself from laughing.

  They were all turning away from her, Dicey thought. When this had happened before, at Cousin Eunice’s house in Bridgeport, it had been bad for the little kids. But here, with Gram, on the farm, with a home, it wasn’t bad for them. She wasn’t sure James was old enough for a job, or reliable enough for it in how much he knew about hard work (and carrying newspapers around, even on a bicycle, was hard work). Sammy hadn’t been in any fights at school, and that was good; but she didn’t understand why he got weepy when he was losing at checkers or parchesi. Maybeth seemed contented, and pleased with her first piano lesson. Maybeth didn’t seem to mind all the schoolwork.

  Anyway, nobody was talking to Dicey, so she guessed they were doing all right without her.

  “I’m going out to the barn for a while, if that’s OK,” she said. Nobody answered her. Maybe they didn’t even hear her. She put her glass into the sink and went on out. It was a relief, in a way, not to have all that responsibility. It felt pretty good to be able to do things without worrying about the little kids. And if Sammy was going to be Gram’s favorite, and James was going to do everything right, and Maybeth was going to get caught up in school, so everybody could be proud of her, and with piano lessons too, why should Dicey mind?

  CHAPTER 3

  ON THE DAYS when Sammy rode along behind James on the paper route, Dicey picked up the mail on her way home. It was early in October when Gram got an answer to her letter to the hospital in Boston where Momma was. Dicey found the letter among a pile of advertising circulars in the mailbox. She stuffed all the mail into her science notebook.

  Dicey would have liked to just leave the circulars or to have returned them to the senders, but Gram said they’d use them to start fires when the weather got cold. Dicey doubted that it ever got cold here in southern Maryland. By October on the Cape, back home, the air was crisp and the leaves were turning colors, and the sand had lost all of its summer warmth. Here, all that happened so far was the water in the Bay turned clear and you could see to the shallow sandy bottom. And the leaves on the paper mulberry were turning a yellowy green. The nights were chilly, but the days were warm enough for the children’s shorts to be comfortable. But Gram promised Dicey there would be cold weather coming.

  Gram already had Sammy at work chopping up kindling with a small ax. She had forewarned Dicey that they were going to need to take the big, two-handled saw to a couple of fallen trees one of these weekends. Dicey had groaned at this, knowing that the time would have to be taken from the slow work on the boat. At the rate she was going, it would never be ready for the water next spring. But she had groaned silently.

  Dicey showed the Boston letter to Gram, who was making bread at the kitchen table. Gram looked at it out of the side of her eyes, grunted and continued kneading. Dicey ate an apple and waited. When they sat down together, Gram looked at Dicey before she opened the envelope. “I hope you’re not expecting good news,” she said.

  “I’m not expecting anything,” Dicey answered impatiently. “I just want to know what it says.”

  “I’m not expecting good news,” Gram said. She opened the envelope carefully with steady fingers.

  It was a long letter, typed, three pages. Gram read it once quickly, then again slowly. She didn’t show Dicey the pages she was finished with. Dicey bit her lip with impatience and tried not to fidget. When Gram finished the second reading, she folded the papers back into the envelope and then folded her fingers tightly together.

  Dicey waited. Gram’s mouth was straight and her eyes stared vacantly at the envelope.

  Dicey waited.

  “I need a cup of tea,” Gram announced. She went to the stove to heat water. When her back was to Dicey, she said, “No change.”

  “None at all?” Dicey asked. She kept her voice level, hiding her own disappointment. She spoke as matter-of-factly as Gram did.

  “So we’ll go ahea
d with the adoption,” Gram said. Dicey stared at her, at the strong back under the loose clothing, at her tanned legs and bare feet. “We can get to work on those forms, now we know.”

  “What did they say?” Dicey asked.

  “I told you once, girl, no change. Are you listening?”

  But the letter was three pages long. It didn’t take three pages to write no change. “What if we went to see her?” Dicey asked.

  “Do you know how much that would cost?”

  Whatever it cost it would be too much.

  Gram dunked the teabag in her cup, then set it aside to be used again. She turned and looked at Dicey. “Life is a hard business,” she remarked.

  “Was it bad news?” Dicey asked, even though she knew she shouldn’t.

  “Don’t you listen?” Gram demanded. There was anger in her voice and in her dark hazel eyes.

  “It doesn’t take three pages to say no change,” Dicey answered, her own anger rising. But she was angry because she was worried and frightened.

  Gram snorted. “For doctors it does,” she said. “I don’t want you making the mistake of thinking life isn’t going to be hard,” she said again.

  “I know that,” Dicey said.

  “I guess you do. I’m a natural fool,” Gram said, “I keep trying to count on things. And Sammy’s too young for that long bike ride. Maybe,” Gram said.

  Dicey knew what the woman was thinking, how the connections were made behind her eyes. But she was glad nobody was there to hear how Gram’s mind jumped around.

  “I’m going to the barn, if that’s all right,” Dicey said. She waited for her grandmother to answer. If Gram wanted Dicey to stay, for company, Dicey would like that. But Gram just said, “Suit yourself.” Dicey shrugged and went out to get a little work done on the boat, and she did not let herself wonder what it was Gram had been counting on. Because Gram said the letter said no change.

  October went on. The children were settling in, just as fall was settling in, over the farm and the water, into shades of brown: the harrowed soil, the dried summer grasses, the broken stalks of corn, and the long golden bars of sunlight from a sun setting closer to seven now than eight. Gram had filed all of her forms, with the lawyer’s help. Now they awaited action on the fat folders filled with copies of the children’s birth certificates and school records, with government papers in triplicate, saying everything that could be written down in numbers about Gram and the farm, about Momma and the kids.

  Sammy mostly left Dicey alone with the boat, and when he did come bother her (she had one side more than half done by then) seemed interested only in asking questions, about how the Indians scalped people and whether there were ghosts, about the ragged bottom of the big barn doors. “Do you think someone did that on purpose?” he asked, fingering the broken-off boards. “Dicey? If you hit at it with a bat, or a sledge hammer.”

  “How’s school?” Dicey asked.

  “Fine I guess,” Sammy told her, not interested in the subject. Well, at least he wasn’t coming home with black eyes and bruises and ripped clothes, the way he had from school in Provincetown and from summer camp in Bridgeport. As long as Sammy wasn’t fighting, Dicey wasn’t going to worry about him.

  James worked hard, reading and taking notes for his report. He’d decided on a topic, “Why the Pilgrims came to America.” “It’s interesting,” he said, but he didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s nice to have something to do again,” he told them.

  Maybeth came home from school one day with an invitation to a birthday party. “You can ride your bike and I’ll ride mine to pick you up,” Dicey said, because it would be getting dark when the party was over. “What’ll you do about a present?” Dicey didn’t know what a guest at a birthday party was supposed to do.

  “I thought I’d make something,” Maybeth told her. “With pine cones. Gram will help. Will you help, Gram?”

  “Of course, I will. But you can’t wear your shorts and T-shirt.”

  All the children’s clothes had to be practical. They had shorts and shirts, that was all. “That doesn’t matter,” Maybeth said.

  “Maybe it really doesn’t,” James said to his grandmother. “Do you know who else is invited, Maybeth? Is it the whole class?”

  “Just some of us,” she told him. “The cake’s going to have pink frosting.”

  Maybeth was making friends, and Sammy seemed not to be getting into trouble, and James was working hard. Dicey herself had what might be called a friend in Mina. They’d gotten A’s on their rock classification project, and Mina always greeted Dicey at school, whenever she saw her. “Hey, Dicey, how you doing.” Dicey always answered, “Pretty good and you,” the way you were supposed to. Then she beat a fast path to her desk, or the next class. She didn’t want anybody to think she was trying to have friends.

  She had seen the guitar-playing boy a couple of times. The first time, she had walked right up and asked him the words for that song about the coat of many colors. He remembered her. After a while, she saw him every day it wasn’t raining. He was sitting in the same place, playing his guitar when she rushed out to get on her bike and go to work. He told her his name, Jeff, and asked her hers. “Dicey Tillerman,” she said, and waited for what he would say next.

  “You related to that old lady with the farm?” he asked. Dicey nodded, her chin high. “What are you, a grandchild?” Dicey nodded again. “Listen, you can sing the melody of that song?” he asked her. “I want to try a harmony.” Dicey could and did, listening to his voice as he made a harmony line with what she was singing, sometimes blending, sometimes moving in contrast. She thought he was fancying it up too much, but she didn’t say so. And she liked singing that song, even though she didn’t understand the story of it. “You sing pretty well,” Jeff remarked.

  “Not particularly,” Dicey told him. “Just better than you. My sister is the one who can really sing. You should hear her sing this song.”

  “I’d like to,” he said, his face friendly. What did he expect her to do, invite him to her house or something? There was something he expected, or wanted, Dicey could see that.

  “I gotta go now,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked. “I’ve got another song you might like.”

  “I gotta go,” Dicey insisted and turned away to get her bike out of the rack and ride away.

  Millie never minded if Dicey was a few minutes late. She didn’t seem to notice. The business continued to improve, Dicey thought; Millie never said anything, as if she had forgotten the terms of their deal. The third week came and went without a word from Millie. And the fourth week. The only thing Millie said about business to Dicey happened when Dicey came in to find her at the checkout counter studying a long printout. Behind her, all over one of the aisles, boxes of dried cereal were spread around. Millie was reading down the sheet, her lips moving silently, her fingers moving along under the words.

  “Want me to put those up on display?” Dicey offered.

  “I dunno where they came from,” Millie said. “I dunno where they’ll fit.”

  “You didn’t order them?”

  Millie shook her head. Dicey looked around for what to do. The windows could wait another day or two, or they could be washed right away. The floor . . . needed a damp mopping she decided. The windows would wait.

  “Oh no,” Millie spoke behind her. “Look what I did. Sometimes I’m so stupid. Just look at that.”

  Dicey looked over her shoulder. The page was the distributor’s order sheet. Millie had filled it out in pencil, changing her mind many times, as Dicey could tell by the erasures and crossings out. “I meant to order corn chips and I ordered corn flakes. I’ll never sell all these boxes. What’ll I do?”

  “Can’t you send them back?”

  “But the corn chips are for people who want them. I always have them.”

  “Or have a special sale on corn flakes,” Dicey suggested. How could Millie have mistaken those two words?

  “I hate the orde
ring, I always make mistakes, and I have to check it all the time. Herbie — he tried to teach me how to do it, but he gave up.”

  The sheet looked pretty simple to Dicey. You just found the items you wanted and put the number you wanted in a little box beside the name and then figured out how much it cost and copied that down. “How can you make mistakes on this?” she asked.

  “Because I never learned how to read, not properly. I can’t even read a newspaper. You didn’t know that, did you. You didn’t know what a stupid old woman you were working for.”

  “But you went to school,” Dicey told her. “You said you went to school with Gram.”

  Millie laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “They kept me back some, when I was littler. Then, I got so big it was embarrassing to them, and I always behaved myself. So they’d just pass me on. I never graduated, didn’t Ab tell you? No, she’s no gossip. It doesn’t matter and it didn’t then, because I was going to get married. Herbie didn’t care. He liked me the way I was. You wouldn’t understand, you’re one of those smart kids.”

  “You can’t read?” Dicey was amazed.

  “Of course, I can read,” Millie said patiently. “I just take so long at it, and the words all look alike. I don’t know, maybe now with all the machines they have for teaching, maybe now I could have learned. But it’s too late for me.”

  Dicey didn’t know what to say. “If you told me what you wanted I could fill out the order sheets,” she finally offered.

  Millie’s face showed hope. “Do you think so? You’re awfully young.”

  “Sure,” Dicey answered. “I don’t have any idea of what you should stock in, but I can read names and numbers.”

  “That would be a load off my mind,” Millie said. “It’s gotten so, since Herbie died, the distributor won’t let me return things any more if I make a mistake. And then,” she confided, “I get so nervous about making a mistake I go over it again and again, and it takes so long, and I can’t think properly about it. Sometimes I cross out what I wanted to order and order the wrong things. As if I wanted to do it wrong.”