Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  Jeff had come in, he said, to try out Millie’s beef. Millie came back to serve him. He picked out a steak and pot roast and then added a couple of pounds of ground chuck.

  “What do you want the chuck for?” Millie asked.

  “Spaghetti sauce,” he told her. She advised him to get regular ground beef for that. Hers had better flavor and less fat than the supermarket ground beef, she told him; it was just as good as chuck for spaghetti. He went along with her suggestion.

  Dicey stood back watching him. He made his choices as if he knew what he was doing, pointing out the pieces of meat he wanted, selecting them from the display. He bent down to peer into the display counter, then studied what Millie brought up. He was really too thin, Dicey decided, seeing him clearly for what felt like the first time. His face was oval and tapered down to a small chin. He had a nose that was perfectly straight and eyebrows with almost no arch in them. His skin was pale, as if he didn’t get outside much. His hair had as much black as brown in it, and his hands looked too big for his arms.

  Dicey thought he was concentrating on his purchases, but he turned to her and said, “I wish you’d stop staring at me. It makes me nervous.”

  Dicey was embarrassed. “I’m sorry.” Then she laughed and went down to the front of the store where Sammy waited patiently. She set out the distributor’s order sheets and sharpened two pencils. “It won’t be long now,” she told Sammy.

  Jeff paid for his purchases, then lingered awkwardly. “I wondered if you’d like a lift home. I’ve got the car, and we could put your bike in the back. It’s pretty cold.”

  “I’ve still got work to do,” Dicey said. “But thanks, anyway.”

  “I’m going home with Dicey,” Sammy announced.

  “Are you? Who are you?”

  “I’m her brother.”

  “Meet Sammy,” Dicey said. “Sammy, meet Jeff.”

  “We could fit you in the car,” Jeff told Sammy. “You don’t take up much room.”

  Jeff was teasing, but Sammy wasn’t in the mood to be teased. “I don’t want to,” he told Jeff. “I’d rather ride on your bike,” he said to Dicey.

  “You don’t look much alike,” Jeff remarked.

  “So what?” Sammy said.

  Sammy’s unfriendliness was making Jeff uncomfortable, and Dicey — reaching out again — wanted to make him feel better. “I’d like a ride, if you don’t mind waiting. Jeff plays the guitar,” she told Sammy.

  “So what?”

  “So maybe you can get him to play for you while you wait,” she said. “So maybe you could be polite when somebody offers to save me six miles of toting your great hulking body around.” This made Sammy smile.

  “I’m not hulking,” he answered. “OK.”

  Jeff and Sammy settled down on the seat made by the long window. Jeff fetched his guitar and showed some chords to Sammy. Millie and Dicey worked at the counter. Out of the side of her ears, Dicey heard Jeff singing a long, repetitious song. Sammy watched Jeff’s hands.

  Waiting for Millie to decide whether she needed another carton of frozen peas yet, Dicey looked up to catch her employer watching the two boys. She suddenly realized that Millie might not like having them singing like that in her store. “Do you mind?” she asked Millie. “We didn’t ask you if it was all right; do you want them to stop?”

  “Why should I?” She turned to Dicey. “It’s pretty,” she added. “Supermarkets have music piped in. But do you think we should order the peas? Or wait for next week?”

  At Jeff’s car, Sammy argued about being asked to sit in the back seat of the station wagon. Jeff answered briefly that his father insisted that kids sit in the back, where it was safer for them.

  “I’m not a kid,” Sammy said. He was jammed in with grocery bags that had been moved onto the seat to make room for Dicey’s bike in the rear.

  “Yeah?” Jeff answered.

  “Yeah,” Sammy answered. “Kids are goats,” he declared.

  “I know that,” Jeff said.

  “So what?” Sammy said. “I don’t care,” he said in response to the expression on Dicey’s face.

  Dicey gave Jeff directions. When they got to the mailbox, Sammy said they could walk in from there, because they had to get the mail. Dicey looked at Jeff and shrugged. She and Sammy pulled the bike out of the back of the car. “Thanks for the ride,” Dicey said.

  “Any time,” Jeff answered. “That is, any time I do the shopping, because that’s the only time I get the car. I was hoping to meet your sister who sings.”

  “We’re in a hurry for dinner tomorrow,” Sammy said. “Because it’s Thanksgiving. Thank you for the ride home.” He handed the mail to Dicey, who noticed another thin envelope from Boston.

  “Maybe another day,” Dicey said.

  “You mean that?” he asked. He had rolled down the window and was looking seriously at her.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Because I will,” he warned her.

  “Good,” she answered, puzzled and amused.

  She and Sammy walked up the rutted driveway together. “I don’t know what you were so unfriendly about,” she said to Sammy. He just shrugged. “It’s cold today,” Dicey said, to emphasize her point.

  “It’s not bad,” Sammy said. “I can’t smell snow.”

  “Not down south here. I don’t know if it every really snows here. What did he sing?”

  “Something about a man and a lady. It only had three chords, the same three, over and over. But they didn’t sound boring. Do you think he’ll really come to see Maybeth?”

  “No,” Dicey said. “Or maybe yes. I don’t know. I don’t know him very well.”

  “I liked him OK,” Sammy told her.

  “Did you? You could have fooled me.”

  Sammy turned before going into the barn to take out his bike. “I can’t fool you,” he assured Dicey. “I’m going to have to hurry, aren’t I?”

  “Burn up the roads,” Dicey advised him. “You’ve got enough time before dark.”

  “I wonder how fast I can make it, if I really ride fast,” Sammy said.

  Dicey found Gram and Maybeth in the kitchen, surrounded by different foods at different stages of preparation. James was busy carrying in logs for the fireplaces. He clattered through the kitchen, his forehead red and flushed, a heavy pea jacket buttoned up around his throat. “You like the coat?” he asked Dicey, puffing under the weight of an armload of logs. “There’s one for each of us. They’re old. They really made good jackets then.”

  A fire burned in the unused dining room, to take the chill off the air. Maybeth had pleaded with Gram to serve the Thanksgiving meal in there, and Gram decided to go along with her wishes. Maybeth wanted that room because she said it was prettier than the kitchen. Gram wanted it because it meant she could spread out her preparations. “It’s been years since I put together a meal like this,” she announced. Dicey couldn’t tell whether she was wishing she wasn’t doing it now.

  There surely was a lot of work that went into it. Dicey put her books away and came downstairs to help Maybeth patiently rip a couple of loaves of bread up into small pieces for stuffing. Gram chopped onions and celery. She had a pan of chestnuts roasting in the oven. “And we’ll all do them tonight after supper’s cleared away,” Gram announced. “There’s no reason one person should be stuck with that job.”

  “Are they worth the trouble?” James asked.

  “Tell me what you think tomorrow,” Gram answered.

  WHAT DICEY THOUGHT, leaning back against her chair, her stomach stretched taut, was that the chestnuts were worth the trouble, the whole meal was worth the trouble. They sat around the dark dining room table, the five Tillermans and Mr. Lingerle. Outside, gray clouds crowded down on the land. Inside, the yellow firelight and the small electric lights on the walls made it feel like evening, instead of midafternoon.

  James and Mr. Lingerle ate on, and the big bowls of sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes, of beans and corn and tomatoes,
all were half-empty. The turkey, which Mr. Lingerle had carved with unexpected skill, was almost half-eaten. Dicey thought about asking for another piece of the crisp skin, but decided that if she did she wouldn’t be able to force down even a polite bite of the two pies Mr. Lingerle had waiting for them. Sammy sat beside her, moaning with contentment. Gram leaned forward, her elbows beside her plate, her curly hair brushed into order, her face — thoughtful and quiet. Maybeth’s round eyes kept looking around the table, and her hands were quiet in her lap.

  Maybe it was because they never had celebrated Thanksgiving before. For a piercing instant, Dicey longed for Momma to be with them, sitting on the other side of Sammy, to complete the picture. That was the trouble with being happy, it made you remember other things. Dicey looked at Gram and wondered what Gram was thinking of. She wondered if Gram was remembering other Thanksgivings, and other faces at her table. Momma was one of those, too.

  “I wish we hadn’t started yet,” Dicey said. “I wish I wasn’t full.”

  Mr. Lingerle lifted his face and halted his laden fork at mid-journey to his mouth. Each of the many ounces of flesh that made up his body seemed to emanate comfort, contentment, good will. Dicey couldn’t stop herself from smiling at him: he was like Thanksgiving made into a single body.

  “What we used to do, when I was a boy, was wait until later in the day to have dessert. We always made plenty of dessert, even though we knew we’d never be able to eat it. Then, at suppertime, instead of any normal meal, we would have the pies.”

  “But —” James said. “What if you still had room, at dinner. Now.”

  Mr. Lingerle chuckled. “You didn’t have to wait.”

  “I’ve never had a chocolate pie,” James mumbled. “I was saving room for some.”

  Sammy groaned quietly. Maybeth got up to clear the table. Dicey picked up the heavy platter that held the turkey, the carving tools, and a large, long-handled silver spoon that Gram called the stuffing spoon. She had pulled it out from a back drawer in the chest in the dining room.

  “You know,” Mr. Lingerle remarked, reaching out to take the spoon from the platter and holding it up, “this is probably valuable. It’s old, I’d guess, and heavy.”

  “I know,” Gram said. “So’s the one in the cranberry sauce. I’ve thought of selling that one, if I had to. The stuffing spoon belonged to my mother. Those were good times for Crisfield, for the bootleggers, at least.”

  “You never said people in your family were bootleggers,” James protested.

  “Our family,” Gram corrected him.

  “Did they bootleg whiskey?”

  “What else?” Gram said. “I never said so, but they were. This was way back. That other spoon now, that was left to me by my husband’s aunt. In her will. She’d have had it buried with her if she could have. She hated to give anything away. I never did like it.”

  “There’s beautiful workmanship on it,” Mr. Lingerle told her, inspecting it.

  Gram shrugged. “You’d know how to go about selling it,” she asked.

  “I’ve got a friend in Easton who has an antique store. Up in Talbot County where the money is — But Mrs. Tillerman, you don’t need money, do you? I mean” — he became flustered and embarrassed — “I should have brought the turkey, I’m sorry. I never even thought, I was so pleased to be asked.”

  Dicey cleared away plates and watched Gram enjoying Mr. Lingerle’s discomfort.

  “Call me Ab,” Gram finally said, putting a stop to his apologies. “We don’t need money, but if we did it’s good to know.”

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “Where’d my plate get to?”

  Only Mr. Lingerle and James ate dessert. The phone rang and Maybeth answered it. It was for Sammy, who came back into the dining room to ask Gram if he could go play at Ernie’s house.

  “No,” Gram said.

  “Why not?” Sammy demanded.

  “It’s Thanksgiving,” James reminded him. James had finished a thin slice of lattice-topped cherry pie and was about to begin on the dark chocolate sliver. “On Thanksgiving, families stay at home.”

  “Aren’t they having a dinner?” Dicey asked.

  “I said, no,” Gram repeated.

  “I could ride my bike. If they were having a dinner he wouldn’t ask me,” Sammy said.

  “I said no and that’s an end of it,” Gram said.

  “But then — I won’t have any friends,” Sammy told her.

  But Gram shook her head firmly.

  Sammy turned abruptly and left the room. When he returned, he was smiling and didn’t mention it again. Mr. Lingerle said he would help with the washing up before he left. Gram said she had expected him to stay into the evening, if he would like to. He said he would like to and that only part of his reason was that he could have a real helping of the pies for supper. Gram snorted. He nominated James as his helper in the kitchen. The rest of the family he sent to lie down in the living room. To gather their energies for the walk, he said, the After-Thanksgiving-Dinner walk.

  Late in the afternoon, everybody wrapped up in coats and walked down to the Bay. A film of ice lay over the water, going out about a hundred yards from shore. Gram recalled the times when the Bay had frozen so hard that you could walk out on it. Dicey thought of the oystermen working in this bitter weather and thought that the gray clouds reflected the gray of the water. She turned around to look back over the muted winter browns of the marsh to where the house stood, if you could see it.

  As if it had been waiting to catch her full attention, the sky loosed a flurry of snowflakes. This wasn’t a real snow, but swirled down lightly, like a rain shower. It came down so few and so slowly, you could watch the descent of an individual snowflake.

  The children, led by Sammy, ran back up the path to the house. Once they’d arrived there, however, there was nothing to do. So they dashed back down the path, to join the two adults, who moved more sedately.

  “It’s snowing!” Sammy cried. “I don’t have mittens!”

  “I’ll find some,” Gram said. “I always wondered if it was worth hoarding all those old clothes away, but now I guess it was,” she said to Mr. Lingerle.

  “Makes me feel like running too,” he remarked. He had a plaid wool scarf wrapped up tight around his neck. Snowflakes lay scattered on his thin hair.

  “You should,” Gram said. “You should take some exercise.”

  “I know, but I don’t. I can’t really,” he told her.

  “It’s not good for you,” she said. “All that extra weight.”

  He agreed, but didn’t say anything. However, as they entered the warm kitchen, Dicey heard him say quietly: “If you really thought that, you’d not have invited me to dinner.”

  “You know better than that, young man,” Gram snapped. Dicey grinned. Gram’s way of reaching out was sure original. Dicey herself was thinking about several things at once, about what that last letter from Boston might have said, about why Sammy wasn’t angry at being refused permission to go to Ernie’s, about James’s friend Toby, who was going to spend the night with them on Saturday for James’s birthday present. (“That’s all I want,” he’d told Gram. “Just that. And a chocolate cake, like Sammy’s. And if you’d make a crab imperial? For supper. And —” “I have just been struck deaf,” Gram announced. “I cannot hear another word you are going to say on the subject.”) And Dicey was thinking about how the ocean never froze but always smashed up the little ridges of ice that dared to form at its edge at a quiet low tide.

  By the time they went to bed, a light dusting of snow glittered over everything, glistening white in the dark air. But when Dicey emerged from Millie’s the next afternoon, there was no sign of it. The cold weather had been nudged aside by an unexpectedly balmy day. Sunlight poured warm out of a cloudless sky; the breeze blew gently, wafting the warm air around. The temperature, Millie told her, had reached the sixties at midday. Dicey peeled her sweater over her head and saw Mina walking toward her, wheeling a bike.
r />   “I brought my bike,” Mina said unnecessarily. “I thought I’d walk out with you a ways. I’ve had enough family to last me a year, and it’s gonna happen all over again at Christmas. Can you believe that?”

  Dicey didn’t know what she was supposed to say. She didn’t say anything.

  “So can I?” Mina asked.

  “Can you what?”

  “Walk with you.”

  “Sure,” Dicey said. They were silent for a block, until Mina asked if Dicey had a nice Thanksgiving, and Dicey said she had.

  They were silent again. After a while, Mina asked, “Was it awfully different from your other Thanksgivings?”

  Dicey was watching a bright red cardinal fly across the road into an empty field. He flew with a queer, swooping motion, low to the land. He flashed red ahead of them and at eye level.

  “They don’t fly high, like other birds,” Dicey observed to Mina.

  “We get a lot of cardinals around here, all winter long,” Mina told her.

  “We never had Thanksgiving before, with Momma,” Dicey said. She couldn’t seem to keep her mind on the conversation; she couldn’t seem to pay attention. It felt like spring fever. “We were too poor,” she explained.

  “That’s no sin,” Mina declared.

  “I never said it was.”

  Mina turned her head and looked at Dicey. “I never said you did. I was just trying to tell you — where I stand. Your brother’s a lot like you.”

  “Did you meet James?”

  “Sammy.”

  “Sammy isn’t. He looks like Momma.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean?” And suddenly Dicey’s mind was clear again, like a sudden cure from spring fever when an icy rain surprises you.

  “What’s got you jumping down my throat?” Mina demanded.

  Dicey looked up at her, struck by a sudden thought: “Or is this the way you talk about the other person?”

  Mina chuckled. “I should have known better than to write that where you’d hear it. I should have known you’d understand it and remember.”