White Houses

by Amy Bloom

  “Oh, Jesus, it hurts,” she said and fell back, pulling on me, until I was down beside her on the bed. I wiggled toward the floor, away from the stink, and she put her hand in my hair and held on.

  “Ain’t you got the curls,” she said.

  She gasped and I sat up. She gasped again and let go.

  “Never mind,” she said. “You scared?”

  I was scared. I tried not to inhale, to not catch what she had. She would die and I would die next.

  My mother turned her face away from the window. The shade was broken. I hung one of her dresses over the rod and she nodded. She yawned and I said, hopefully, You tired, Mama? You want to take a little rest? She shook her head and yawned again and I could see into her mouth, her thick tongue, her bright red gums, the spaces where she’d lost her teeth. (Have a baby, lose a tooth, everyone said.) She stank to high heaven and I went to open the window. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she opened her mouth wide, the veins in her neck popping, as if to scream, and she settled down suddenly, easing into the pillow. A little blood ran out of her mouth and I ran down the stairs, running over Ruby, who grabbed at my legs, kicking Myrtle to one side.

  My father’d slept on the kitchen floor with two blankets under his back and the rocker cushion for a pillow and he’d left them in a pile.

  I saw him by the fence and ran over. I told him my mother was bleeding out her mouth. He asked if she was still talking and I said that we spoke just a minute ago.

  “She ain’t dying, then. You go back up. Wipe her mouth with water. Folks get dry.”

  He took a drink from his flask and handed it over.

  “You can give her this.”

  I didn’t ask when would he come upstairs or when could I stop sitting with her.

  I spooned out whiskey for her until the flask was empty.

  “Pa says you ain’t dying,” I said.

  She lifted her chin.

  I pulled the sheet up to her shoulders and she pushed it away, wincing.

  “I’m gonna go,” I said. “Just downstairs.”

  She waved her hand sideways.

  I slept in until the sunlight beat on my face. The little girls were scattered, out of the house. My father was in the kitchen with the minister and an older lady.

  “Lorena,” my father said and I bobbed down, to show respect.

  The minister said, Shall we pray, and my father let his head drop forward, like an old horse, waiting for the bit, and I did the same. The minister said Jesus and Our Lord and he said my mother’s name. He said Anna Hickok, mother of Lorena, Rose, and Myrtle, beloved wife of Addison Hickok and that’s how I knew. I could hear the girls playing down the road. I sighed and my father tightened his grip on my hand and rubbed my knucklebones together, to warn me.

  The minister’s voice died down and I said, I oughta look after the girls, and I broke away.

  I went down by the fence. Ruby was still crying and Myrtle was her usual wild-dog self.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” I said.

  “Not, it will not,” Myrtle said.

  I put Ruby up on my shoulder and dragged Myrtle down the path. We sat in the barn, napping in the shade and playing hopscotch with an old horseshoe, until it was almost dark. I figured whichever neighbors could put something together would be bringing us a bread or a chess pie or some potato and beans before nightfall. I was right and the four of us sat down and ate a dinner like we hadn’t had in a year and my father didn’t smack anyone’s hand away from anything. Ruby said, God bless Mama, and the three of us nodded. That was my mother’s funeral.

  * * *

  —

  My father came home the last Friday in August, in the tight salesman’s suit and greasy celluloid collar Miz Min made him buy. The suit made him look cheap, which he was, and dishonest, which he was not, not in the business way. He set his brown bowler on the sideboard and his wrinkled jacket on the back of the rocker and he stretched his neck from side to side. He nodded to Miz Min. She dusted off a chair for him and told us to sit by her. My father said that Ruby was going to live with an uncle on my mother’s side, in Wisconsin. “Good people,” he said and Miz Min shrugged. She didn’t give a fiddler’s fuck if they were good people or not. Ruby was the sweet and pretty one, my father’s favorite, if he had one, and to have her gone would be a relief for Miz Min, I think.

  Myrtle was hell on two feet, but she was sly and only six and they’d keep Myrtle with them for a while longer, until she gave them cause.

  I was stubborn trouble at home, and almost a woman. I had a nice singing voice and when things were not too bad, my father took me to church and sat in the front pew (like a paying customer, he said) and made sure I got a solo. I could see the way Miz Min would see it.

  My father got down a cardboard box from his closet and said that there were people in town, plenty of them, looking for a “hired girl.” One dollar a week, he said. Maybe more. Plus meals. Not too bad and you can keep going to school. He said that surely I could clean a house and we both snorted because I never did a lick of housework after my mother got sick, and he knew it. He beat me every day the week before she passed and all it got him was shrunken trousers and stew so salty and soapy, he let us put it in a pan behind the house and watch to see what kind of brave gophers might come for it. I didn’t think Miz Min would have let us watch what happened to the stew.

  She gave Myrtle a little tap on the fanny, to show that Myrtle needed to be minding Miz Min for real now, and she said to me that since the three of them would be moving on, she advised me to do the same.

  She said, “If you can help it, don’t clump around. And smile. People like it when a girl smiles.”

  I went to our room and my father followed me in. He put a cardboard box on the bed. This is for your things, he said. He put in my mother’s hairbrush. Use it, he said. I folded up every bit of clothing I had, my mother’s shoes, and the last of her lily-of-the-valley soap, which she’d used, sliver by sliver, since I was a little girl. I hugged Ruby hard, and we hid our faces in each other’s shoulders, trying not to give way. I waved to Myrtle, who lifted her hand. My father walked me to the door and opened it.

  I walked down the road and around the first bend, to where they couldn’t see me. I knew this road like a conductor knows the tracks. It was past six o’clock on a Friday night in August. The sky was still bright blue, the edge of the trees just a hair darker. Town traffic was done. Farmers were done. I could have stood or slept right in the middle of the road and never seen a soul.

  I slept under a cottonwood and woke up with my arms around my box. I had nowhere to go but Lottie Miller’s house, four miles away. Lottie was the other smart girl in our school. We sat together at lunch for three years in a row. I got to sit with Lottie for twenty minutes at a time, holding her hand, breathing her in. Once I saw I could get my foot in the door with Lottie, I made a real effort. I brushed my hair and chewed mint on the way to school. Her mother sometimes came by to walk her home from school and I always gave her a big Hello, Mrs. Miller and she smiled. Lottie’s father was one of the shopkeepers who used to yell at Myrtle.

  * * *

  —

  I spit on my shirtsleeve to wipe my face and dragged the hairbrush through my hair. I tied it all back with my hair ribbon and I hoped that even if I looked like a fool or a hobo, my wish to please the Millers would please them.

  I sat on the Millers’ back porch for about an hour, until I saw Lottie’s mother, moving around the kitchen in her housedress. She gasped when she saw me. She managed, without being unkind, to get me to rinse off in the hip bath, while she stood guard at the back door. She asked me if my mother and father knew where I was and I told her that my father had told me to go get a job and my mother died three weeks ago. I smiled at every question, to show how willing and pleasant I was.

  I should have hidden myself under the piece of linen Lottie’s mother handed me, but there was a breeze. It came through the back door, touching me on my chest a
nd neck and between my legs. Water ran from my hair down my back, to my feet. I shook my hair so it sprayed water around me. It was heaven. I had never been lovely in all my conscious life but I knew right then, standing barefoot on the rag rug on top of the linoleum, that I was clean, and young and damp and that that was a kind of lovely. Lottie’s mother turned her back right away.

  I patted myself dry slowly, feeling my skin through the old sheet. I dried my toes and all of my parts. I held the sheet like a shawl and shimmied it up and down my back. I put on my only underclothes and my blue blouse and my better skirt and my mother’s shoes. I could see Mrs. Miller had hoped that a decent bath and doing my hair in braids would make me more like Lottie. I had hoped so too. I knew we had a problem.

  I ate on the back porch at supper, so as not to disturb Mr. Miller, who worked long hours. I put myself fully in the hands of Mrs. Miller, just to pretend that I was a girl like Lottie, floating along in a loving stream, cared for and watched over. I prayed that Lottie’s mother might take me in. I left no crumbs. I cleaned my shoes every day. I only drank water and I never asked for seconds, so no one would think I’d be any kind of burden on the Miller household. In the evenings, I swept out the kitchen and sat on the back porch, still as a bucket, waiting until Lottie gave me the high sign to run up to her room. I was thirteen years old and if I was going to hell, or the poorhouse, or was forced to sell myself in downtown Pierre, like one of the older girls at school had said could happen, I was gonna have a holiday first.

  Lottie and I read poetry aloud. We found Mrs. Miller’s Ouija board in the attic and I made it say that I would go far and Lottie would marry a rich and handsome fellow. I teased Lottie about her future husband, hoping it might lead to us playing Honeymoon, which we’d played before, on a rainy afternoon, when the road to my house was washing out and Rose and Myrtle had stayed with our teacher. We were getting ready for Honeymoon (Lottie with a pillowcase over her head, like a scarf, to signify train travel and me, the groom, with a cardigan buttoned over my blouse). Lottie’s mother came in and stood in the doorway. She said we were too loud and I was banished to the sleeping porch. I folded up the quilt every morning and swept the porch too, to show some more of my goodness. On the fourth day of the only holiday I’d ever had, Lottie’s mother woke me up early. Mr. Miller had already gone and Lottie was still sleeping. She took my hand and brought me into her bedroom. She gave me a white slip and one of her own dresses. She brushed my hair and clipped it back with a pair of enamel slides, which was pretty much tying a ribbon on a side of beef, but I let her. She gave me a pair of Lottie’s embroidered anklets and we both tried to make something of my mother’s shoes, which were close to falling apart.

  “I wish we wore the same size,” she said. “Honest to goodness, I’d give you my own.”

  “I know you would,” I said. “You are the kindest person I’ve ever known. Ain’t nobody like you.”

  “Isn’t.” Lottie’s mother sighed. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  —

  When Eleanor woke up, I said that I could tell her my story now, if she wanted, and she said she did. I said we’d been poor most of my life (we had two good years in Wisconsin, I said, but I don’t remember them very well), and even worse, we were poor in South Dakota. I said that my father had been brutal to me and my sisters and that my mother died when I was thirteen and I had nursed her as best I could.

  “It must have meant so much to your mother, having you there,” Eleanor said.

  “I hope so.”

  I told her that I’d lost track of my two little sisters and I told her a funny story about me and Ruby making kites out of newspaper, when we were little. I told her about playing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I told her I’d worked as a hired girl for a while, mopping the floor and burning the brownies. I told her about Mrs. Miller’s kindness.

  “I’m not much of a housekeeper,” I said.

  “Nor am I,” she said. “I wasn’t raised to do it. I must say, I admire women who have domestic skills.”

  I said I admired people who could kill, skin, and cook a rabbit but I didn’t want to do what they did.

  Eleanor patted my shoulder and walked out of our compartment. She came back, wearing a fresh blouse and fresh lipstick (My daughter makes me, she said), carrying a tray of coffee, orange juice, and rolls. Eleanor said that she’d meet Missy and go with her to the funeral. You needn’t, she said, meaning I shouldn’t. I thought I could write a pretty hot story about the governor’s wife and mistress attending the funeral of the mistress’s mother, but then I’d have no more Eleanor and no ride home.

  I said I’d find myself a diner and sit there until the five-o’clock train whistled. We parted at the station and I watched her go.

  To this day, I love a diner. I tucked two dollars under the sugar bowl so the one waitress, a tall, pretty redhead with freckles head to foot, would pour me coffee all day. At lunchtime, a few salesmen came in and at three o’clock we got some mothers and their lucky, well-fed children. A dark, chunky girl and a slim, ratty blonde sat in the booth in front of me, sharing a Moxie, folding their straw wrappers into a chain. The blonde said if she never cleaned another toilet again, it’d be too soon. The dark girl sighed and they slipped off their shoes.

  My people, the hired girls.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t tell Eleanor much. I didn’t tell her that I had cried into my sleeve when Mrs. Miller brought me to the gate of a good-sized house. We will all miss you, she said, but this really is a decent job and you can still go to school. She had smoothed back my hair one more time and she kissed me on the forehead, which I felt for days after. I told her straight out that I wasn’t up to snuff, that I’d done my best to fool her with the sweeping and wiping my shoes but I hadn’t ever done laundry beyond diapers or made a meal or looked after anyone except Ruby and Myrtle and what I’d done with them wasn’t exactly a recommendation. Lottie’s mother looked to the right and the left and she whispered that it was no matter; the O’Neills couldn’t get anyone better, because of their papish ways.

  There was a small Catholic church fifty miles away and the Klan had ridden through a few of the bigger towns, was what I heard, but I hadn’t heard that anyone had burned a cross in front of the church or hurt the people at the Chinese laundry. And, still, the reason the O’Neills would take me was that the better class of hired girl—neat, pleasant, cheerful, good with a peeler and a dust mop—wouldn’t work for Irish people. I couldn’t do a goddamn thing but make porridge and wash a baby’s diapers until they didn’t stink and still they would have me. One dollar a week.

  * * *

  —

  The O’Neills were easy. They were not nicer than Mrs. Miller, who I see now was a motivated seller, but they were filled with confidence and enough money, from where I stood, and they loved each other, which astonished me. The first time Charley O’Neill raised his hand to his wife, I flinched. He tucked a brown-edged daisy from the yard behind her ear and she kissed his hand. Their little girl, giddy with all the love, pressed her face to Mrs. O’Neill’s breast and I thought, Oh, who are you people? I loved them, the way girls today love their movie stars. I got up early, to make breakfast for little Lucille, and for baby Brendan. Mrs. O’Neill came down to supervise, looking tousled and charming, like a Gibson girl at dawn. I fed the kids and cleaned the baby’s diaper. I scoured the pot and ran out the door to school, eating my toast or Brendan’s teething biscuit. When Miss West dismissed us, I tore ass back to the O’Neills’, to get dinner started and keep up with the diapers. Sometimes Lottie ran part of the way with me and when I turned off for the O’Neills’, she waved, warmly, and I waved back, hard as I could. Lottie was too kind to take up entirely with another girl but I did see her look with interest at Addie Long, at lunchtime.

  * * *

  —

  I was, just as I’d said, not much good as a hired girl. It turned out that I was good enough company for Mrs. O’Neill. S
he was from far-off Boston, which accounted for her odd accent and her occasional cigarette, even though she was not a bad woman. She told me that one October afternoon, while she leafed through a magazine and I rocked both the kids. I laughed and I told her that smoking a cigarette was not my idea of a bad woman. She said that she was surprised that a young girl like me had any idea of what a bad woman even was. I said, Oh, I did, for sure, and she shook her head. I’ll get some rest myself, she said and left me rocking the baby carriage and the bassinet, in the shade. I washed her intimate things, I cleaned her babies’ bottoms, and I scrubbed every dirty thing I came across. I didn’t do any of it well, but I made an effort, as Mrs. O’Neill often said, and it was better than having to live in Bowdle, South Dakota, and clean house all day herself. I used to be a secretary, she said.

  I was bathing the kids in the hip bath, in the kitchen, letting the baby blow bubbles and letting Lucille splash all over. Mrs. O’Neill was keeping an eye on us and making remarks about the magazine recipe for brownies and whether or not either one of us could produce a tray of them with her temperamental oven. We both heard the knock on the front door. It was low-class for her to answer the door herself but I was soaked and barefoot and that was worse. She looked at my feet and went to the door. I laid the baby on the wet floor and put on my socks and shoes. I pushed back my hair and dried my face and hands. I heard my father’s voice and I sat back down on the floor, with Lucille and Baby Bren in my lap. Mrs. O’Neill came in, and her voice shook a little.