Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  Dicey could see the fresh white sheets rise and fall, just slightly, as Momma breathed.

  Well, Dicey said to herself, she’d known it was bad news. She could see what was happening, and she knew why Gram had rushed up here. Momma was dying.

  Dicey felt herself begin to shake, inside where it didn’t show to anyone. Gram stood at the side of Momma’s bed, looking down at her, as motionless as her daughter. Dicey stood at the foot of the bed, shaking so hard the pieces of her heart almost made a noise she could hear. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. Dicey stared at the blank face, willing Momma to open her eyes and look at them.

  Gram didn’t say a word, but when Dicey looked back at her she had tears coming out of her eyes and sliding down her cheeks. Dicey wanted to say something to her, but she couldn’t think of what to say. It wasn’t like Gram to cry.

  You don’t know anything about her, really, Dicey shouted to herself inside her head. You don’t know what she expected to find up here, yet you don’t know what she’s thinking about.

  Preston came to put a chair down beside Gram. She handed Gram a tissue. Gram wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She took off her coat and put her purse on the floor. She sat down on the chair. Preston put another chair on the other side of Momma, and Dicey moved stiffly over to sit on it. After that, they were alone in the thick silence of the ward, Gram and Dicey, and Momma.

  Gram reached out for one of the still hands. She held it in both of hers. “Oh Liza,” she said. Dicey had never heard anything sadder than her grandmother’s voice.

  “I have them with me, Liza,” Gram said, in the same voice. “They’re all home with me. Dicey and James, Maybeth and Sammy. I’ll take care of them, I promise you. I wish you had come with them. I wish you had come home years ago. I miss you. I missed you the day you left, and every day since then.”

  She stopped, took a breath, then started talking again. “I’ve got Dicey here with me now,” she said. She talked and talked, about the children and what they looked like. She told about how they had arrived. She talked about what they were doing in school, at home. Dicey watched Momma’s unresponding face and did not listen.

  Dicey felt as if she was broken into pieces and didn’t know how to gather herself together again. She was angry at herself about this. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected bad news. It wasn’t as if she had ever expected to see Momma again, not after the way Momma had wandered off and forgotten them. There was no reason for Dicey to feel so sad and hurt.

  Dicey unbuttoned her jacket. She was too cold to take it off, but the air in this room was close and stale and choking. The curtains that separated their narrow cubicle from all the other narrow cubicles were white, faded to pale yellow.

  Momma’s eyelids never moved. Her pale eyelashes rested on her cheeks. Maybe, Dicey thought to herself, while Gram’s voice talked on, maybe it was so hard because this was really Momma, not some idea of her. All the time Momma had been gone, Dicey had carried around an idea of her. The idea was of Momma sleeping, and behind that were all the ideas of Momma that Dicey had saved up over her life. But idea wasn’t the same as real, and real hurt.

  Because she remembered Momma moving around. She remembered Momma’s voice singing. She remembered Momma’s eyes looking glad or worried, or laughing. She remembered Momma bringing Sammy home from the hospital. Momma was tired, then, and worried about how to take care of them; but she was still glad to have Sammy, and James and Maybeth and Dicey too. Momma loved her children. You could tell in the way her hands rested on their heads. (Dicey could still recall the feeling of Momma’s hand resting on her head.) And in her voice when she talked to them. You could tell in how long she tried, how hard she worked.

  Dicey wondered if Momma had known that she was worked out, and tired out. If she had felt herself crumbling at the edges and that was why she had started them on the road to Bridgeport. Trying to get them to a safe place before she crumbled away.

  A hot flame of anger shot through her: Momma was good, and she didn’t deserve to be dying here. She deserved to be with her family, at Gram’s house, seeing how things were working out all right. There was no call for Momma to die, no reason for it, no good to come of it.

  “ . . . paper mulberry tree,” Gram was saying. Dicey caught the words. “You remember that, surely. Where John built you the platform so you could get away when they got too rough for you. Your brothers, your father, your mother, too. I remember that. That was a fine thing John did, I thought. And telling Bullet never to go up there, because it was your place. He stood up to your father, too, and made him give the lumber.

  “Your father is dead. He’s buried next to Granny — you remember, in the cemetery by the Methodist church where we used to take flowers. It was a heart attack. Quick, and that’s good. Bullet too — he’s dead too. In Vietnam. They said, should they send him home, and I said, ‘Why bother now. What difference would it make.’ John was gone by then. After he took that job in California he just stayed out there. I guess. He sent me an announcement, about getting married — oh, years ago, and we didn’t answer. I have it somewhere. There have been sad times, Liza.”

  The body on the bed made no response.

  “But good times too. Then, and now again, with your children. I was alone for a long time, and there were good times in that, too. I keep thinking.”

  Preston’s voice interrupted Gram. “Dr. Epstein’s here. Mrs. Tillerman?”

  Gram lifted her head. “I don’t want to leave her alone.”

  “It doesn’t matter to her,” Preston said. Her voice made the words gentle.

  “It does to me. Stay with your momma, girl,” Gram said to Dicey.

  Dicey nodded. Gram let go of the hand she had been holding. She put the arm down flat and got up. Dicey reached out to take the hand on her side of the bed. It was cool, unresponsive. She leaned over toward her mother’s still face and began to talk. “Momma? We’re fine, really. We’re going to live with Gram.”

  Somehow holding onto the hand, she had the same impulse Gram had had, to talk. Talk was reaching out to the form on the bed, even though you knew it couldn’t be called back. Dicey began to tell her mother what had happened to them, after the last time they had seen her.

  After a while, Gram came back and sat down again. She looked at Dicey across the bed. “You might want a word with him yourself,” she said. “She’s dying.”

  “I can see that,” Dicey snapped.

  Gram just nodded, and that made Dicey sorry she’d snapped. But she didn’t know how to say so to Gram. Gram opened her purse and took out her wallet. She gave Dicey five twenty-dollar bills and the key to the motel room. Dicey took them in her hand.

  “It’s almost Christmas,” Gram said. “See if you can find something for your brothers and sister.” She looked down at Momma’s face. “Have a good walk. If you find something for yourself. . . . “ Her voice drifted away. She reached out and took up Momma’s hand again. She glanced at Dicey. “I knew this was going to happen. But still. . . . ”

  Dicey sat, her hand clutching the money and key.

  “Get off now, girl. There’s nothing to be done here. Nothing but wait.”

  Dicey fled. Outside, in the corridor, a doctor stood. He was smoking on a thin cigar. He wore a white coat and was a slim, mouse-faced man. Dicey was about to turn down the hall to the elevator when he said her name. “Dicey Tillerman?”

  She went over to him. All she really wanted was to get away and walk fast. There was pain in her that needed walking out, or burning out. Because it was Momma lying there in that bed, far away and going farther.

  “Did your grandmother tell you?”

  Dicey nodded, biting her lip.

  “We did everything that could be done with the resources we have. She never really responded. She was undernourished, too, when she arrived here. Maybe she’d starved herself. She never tried. Never responded to any treatment, medical or psychiatric. We’re surprised she even held on this long.” He sighed.
He seemed to want to say something that would comfort. Or something that would explain. “Maybe it’s better this way,” he said lamely.

  Dicey could feel her eyes burning up at him. She wanted to ask, Why? How? How could someone die of just being crazy, the kind of sad, faraway craziness that Momma had?

  But he didn’t seem to know what else he wanted to say. He drew back, away from her, as if he was afraid she might hurt him. Dicey almost told him not to worry, the only person she was hurting was herself. But she didn’t feel like bothering.

  “I don’t know why your grandmother insisted on coming up,” he complained.

  Dicey waited.

  “Believe me,” he said, almost pleading. “It is better this way.”

  Dicey just stared at him; and then she walked away.

  She burst out of the building. She hadn’t buttoned her coat and the air was freezing cold. At the sidewalk, she stopped to push the big buttons through their holes and to look around her. Her fingers were numbed by the air, and she noticed a rim of dirty gray snow by the side of the road. Pieces of paper blew around on the sidewalk until they came to the edges of the buildings. There they nestled up forlornly.

  Dicey didn’t have a hat or mittens, she didn’t have shoes that kept the cold from coming up through the soles of her feet. The icy wind stung at her cheeks. That was all right with her. She had an angry fire now, inside of her. She didn’t know who she was angry at, that doctor, or the whole hospital, or even Momma. She had trouble breathing deeply as she strode along, with her head down against the wind. And she was angry at herself too: because it wasn’t as if she hadn’t guessed this, it wasn’t as if she’d ever thought Momma would come back. So why should it bother her so much? She was being stupid. She didn’t believe that Momma had meant to go away like this, she didn’t think that Momma wanted to.

  But just the same, she had.

  Dicey wasn’t hungry so she turned down a street that had a lot of stores on it. She had a pocketful of money. She didn’t know why Gram had given her so much. Probably it was a mistake.

  Dicey walked down the street, fast, looking in the windows. Then she walked up the street. People jostled past her, but she couldn’t be bothered to get out of their way. If someone shoved her she shoved back, not looking.

  This street had small stores. Dicey went into a toy store, where Christmas carols filled the air inside. It had dolls and games, stuffed animals and building sets and airplanes, toys that little children could pull, and wooden trucks painted in bright colors. She thought Maybeth might like a fancy doll, but she couldn’t find one that didn’t have an empty, simpering face. Some of the dresses the dolls wore were beautiful and fancy, but all of their faces had blinking round eyes and little turned-up noses, and if they were real faces you wouldn’t ever like those people. Dicey couldn’t buy something like that. She thought James might like a game, but she didn’t know what except maybe chess. Chess was for smart people. But the chess sets had lightweight plastic pieces, and she didn’t like that. She thought Sammy might like a teddy bear, but she thought he wouldn’t like to be given one.

  How was she supposed to buy these things? Dicey demanded, her anger spreading to include Gram. And they should be buying something they needed.

  They were always buying things they needed, Dicey thought angrily to herself, leaving the toy store abruptly.

  She looked in the window of a store that sold things made out of wood. There was a huge toy train, with an engine and a coal car and a passenger car and a freight car and a caboose; it was big enough to let a little kid push it along with his feet as he rode on it. The grain in the wood swirled around. It reminded Dicey of the sailboat, and she knew that if she went inside and touched the sides of the train cars, they would have the same silky feel as the sides of the boat that Sammy had sanded down for her. Standing up on racks, a couple of wooden plates next to a wooden goblet caught her eye. It wouldn’t be bad, Dicey thought, to eat off wooden plates. They were surely pretty, with a deep, polished gleam to them. She wondered what would happen if she didn’t paint the sides of her boat. She had a glimpse of how it might look, bobbling beside the dock with the sails rolled up and the wooden hull shining. She guessed she would have to varnish it, and varnish cost more than paint.

  The next store she went into was for ladies. She went in because her hands were cold and she saw gloves in the window. The pair she liked weren’t fancy, just plain leather. Inside, when a woman with a doubting face approached her, Dicey asked to see them. She slipped her hands into them. The gloves were lined with something warm and woolly. On the outside, they were soft brown leather, and the thick seams looked strong. Dicey looked at her own hands and measured with her memory’s eye. They would fit Gram.

  The woman said they cost fourteen dollars. Dicey had eighteen dollars of her own money, back in the motel room. She wanted those gloves, and they were practical too. She wanted them for Gram’s hands when her fingers turned white with cold. She wanted to give something to Gram, not at Christmas but right away.

  Somehow, carrying the bag holding the box with Gram’s gloves, Dicey felt a little better. She began to think about the little kids and what they might like getting. When she saw a secondhand bookstore, she went in. James always liked books. If she could find something old and thick. Old books didn’t cost as much as new books.

  The air in the store was dusty and warm. A young man sat by a cash register at the front, his feet looped into the bars of a tall stool. He was wearing scuffed boots, and seeing them reminded Dicey of her own cold feet. She stamped on the floor and peered into the room. Rows and rows of bookcases made alleyways down the long room. The young man was reading. Dicey started down one row.

  Paperbacks, regular hardbound books, fancy leather ones, one after the other, like stalks of corn in a field: how was she supposed to know what James would like? She had never heard of any of these stories, or any of these writers. She bet even James hadn’t.

  Dicey reached up and pulled down one book. She chose it because it was bound in red leather. When she looked inside, it was in a language she’d never seen before. Not English. She put it quickly back and moved on.

  She would go up and down every row, she decided, and maybe something would catch her eye and if it did maybe she would buy it. But she wanted to be sure it was something James would like. It was warm and quiet in the store; nobody paid any attention to her. It was like Momma’s hospital in a way, with the books lined up like patients. You didn’t know what was inside them.

  Dicey wondered if James knew how very many books there were in the world. She guessed maybe he did. Every now and then she pulled one down to just look at it. The only book that she could recognize as interesting was a big book of songs, with piano music. She studied that for a long time, turning the pages and looking at the pictures. She had heard of about half the songs. Some of the others had words she liked. But James wouldn’t want a song book. She slipped it back into place, sighed, and went on down another aisle.

  She was partway down the last aisle when she had a sudden idea. In the toy store, there were planes you shot from catapults with elastics. The planes had broad white wings and shiny red fuselages. She could see Sammy playing with one of those, out front by the paper mulberry, making the plane soar and swoop. She grabbed the bag that held Gram’s gloves and hurried outside again. She hurried so fast she almost stepped into a puddle of ice-frosted water at the curb.

  In the toy store, children and their mothers were crowding around the shelves. It was a tiny store, bright with the colors of the paints and bright with the music of Christmas carols. Most of the people in it were young. They talked and quarreled, they laughed when they found something they liked. Some of the women had long lists they would take out and study.

  Dicey went back to where she had seen the planes on display. They were plastic, but not the same kind of light plastic as the chess game. If there was such a thing as fancy plastic, that was what these planes were. She picked
one up and felt its balance in her hand. It had long tapering wings; probably so that it could sail out farther. She looked at the way the catapult worked, and that, too, seemed strong. Then she looked at the prices.

  The littlest plane cost five dollars, the middle size cost ten, the large one cost fifteen. Fifteen dollars for a toy — you’d have to be pretty rich to be able to spend that much money on a toy. But in comparison, the littlest plane looked too small, meager. Dicey took the middle size.

  The girl behind the counter gave her only one, harried, glance before she filled out the receipt and put the plane and catapult into a box. She put in a big elastic too, and took Dicey’s money.

  “What if the elastic breaks?” Dicey asked.

  “It won’t.”

  “How do you know?” Dicey asked.

  Instead of getting angry, the girl smiled. She took the top off the box and put in two more elastics. She put the top back on and answered, “Because I have one myself, at home.”

  “Oh,” Dicey said. “Thank you,” she said.

  “It’ll last,” the girl assured her.

  Dicey nodded. After the warmth in there, maybe because they sold toys, the street seemed even dingier and colder. Dicey went down past the wood store again, and then back to the bookstore. There she bought the big songbook for Maybeth. She knew what James would say, that Maybeth couldn’t read it. “So what?” Dicey answered inside her head. “She can read the music, and besides, I thought you said her reading was improving, and I bet she can, anyway.” The book cost nine dollars, and Dicey was surely surprised by that, because, after all, it was old. But it was what she wanted to give Maybeth. It was what she was sure Maybeth would like.