My One Hundred Adventures

by Polly Horvath

  I keep staring at them out the window although Mrs. Stewart has gone to the front of the room.

  “Welcome to a very special evening at the library,” she begins.

  “Vroom vroom,” goes Max.

  Mrs. Stewart looks around, trying to figure out where that sound is coming from.

  “I’d like to welcome all of you and especially our honored poets, who—”

  “Vroom,” goes Hershel.

  “Shhh,” I say.

  Mrs. Stewart looks at me and frowns. I look at Max and frown. Max starts to crawl toward the window. I get down and crawl after him, trying to hide behind chairs so Mrs. Gourd, if she glances inside, won’t see me.

  Mrs. Gourd has her hands on her hips and looks angry but I think she may be one of those people who always looks angry. Ginny is gesticulating and the Gourd children are racing wildly over the steps and we can hear them and the baby crying.

  “Marian, can you please go outside and see what is going on,” says Mrs. Stewart, sending the assistant librarian into the fray. “As I was saying, it’s a great pleasure to have a poet like H. K. Thomson here with us tonight.” But many heads are still turned toward the steps, where the assistant librarian is talking to Mrs. Gourd.

  Ginny races back in and plops herself next to me. I don’t dare say anything. Mrs. Stewart is staring at the two of us as if we will be ejected any minute. But, then, oh thank heavens, Mrs. Gourd leaves. I see her snap something at the Gourd children, who immediately stop running around and follow her down the steps.

  “Well, let us delay no longer. I’m so pleased to introduce tonight a poet all of you know. She graces many of our town’s events and gives generously of her time—please welcome Cassandra Lark.”

  There is some mild applause. Max and Hershel are still whispering “Vroom” but fortunately Cassandra Lark takes the podium with such drama, so many swishy black layers and beads, and she shouts her poetry so loudly that it commands our attention again.

  When she is finished and while everyone is applauding, Ginny tells me what has happened. She has told Mrs. Gourd that we will meet her in the parking lot by the beach tomorrow morning to make an offer. Ginny doesn’t let Mrs. Gourd know that my mother won’t be there. Also, the assistant librarian has told Mrs. Gourd that it might not be a good idea to bring a crying baby and all the little Gourds to a poetry reading.

  “This is fortunate because she seemed pretty determined to talk to your mother,” says Ginny. “But by tomorrow, we will have a plan.”

  Then Mrs. Stewart introduces my mother. My mother’s voice is calm and quiet and when she starts reading, her nervous face gives way to one that is full of wonder for the things she has written about. She does not punch her words like Cassandra Lark or look as if she is listening to her voice more than reading to us. The words roll. She looks plain in a way that is beautiful. The way Shaker furniture is beautiful.

  I do not listen to any poetry. I keep going through the events of the day over and over. I just want to go home and go to bed now that the adrenaline has stopped coursing through me, but H. K. Thomson takes an entire hour. Finally it is over and the librarian thanks the poets but she is looking only at H. K. Thomson and then she talks about upcoming library business and everyone convenes for cake and coffee.

  Ginny doesn’t want any cake. She says she will go home and try to figure out what to say to Mrs. Gourd in the morning and I walk her down the library steps, making plans for her to knock on my window at dawn.

  I go back inside to find my mother. I realize I have left Maya and Hershel and Max and I was supposed to be watching them. I look worriedly for them now but they are fine. They are gathered around the refreshment table, where they are messily eating cake. As long as there is cake on the table they will be happily occupied. Chocolate frosting is smeared all over Hershel’s face. I bend over to pick up their toys and put them back in the plastic bag. At that moment I spy my mother, who is talking to H. K. Thomson. He is listening to her but looking at Max and Hershel and Maya with horror. I know they are messy but horror seems like an extreme reaction.

  H.K.’s sister, Caroline, is sitting alone in a folding chair among a sea of empty chairs, glaring at my mother. Maybe she wants to get home and thinks my mother is delaying H.K. My mother keeps talking and H.K. is looking ill. Maybe he has eaten too much cake.

  I go over to get my mother. I am exhausted by everything and full of dread. I stand by her and grab her sweater and she reaches down and takes my hand without looking at me.

  “Anyhow, I thought perhaps you should know. I wouldn’t have said anything if you hadn’t made that remark about how adorable the children were.”

  “This is quite a shock, Felicity. But don’t worry, I will do the right thing.”

  “Don’t be silly, Henry. There’s no need to do anything at all.”

  “We must talk about this some more. Let’s do lunch.”

  My mother laughs and then looks at his face and sees he is serious. “Well, of course, if that’s what you’d like. Certainly. I’d be happy to have lunch sometime. Now I really must get home. Hershel is going to get chocolate on everything before long and Delores has had quite enough of us, I can see.”

  She means Mrs. Stewart, who is shooing Max and Maya and Hershel in the direction of the door while trying to keep their sticky fingers off her.

  My mother and I hurry Hershel and Maya and Max the rest of the way out of the building. My mother thanks the librarian, who just nods curtly and runs off toward H.K.

  We reach the beach. The wind picks up and I take off my shoes. The sand is comfortingly cool on my hot feet. I run down the beach for the wind in my face and my hair. I feel the way the birds must when they are blown about on its currents. When I run back to my mother I am better even though I know it is only temporary.

  My mother laughs at me but doesn’t say much. She laughs easily and at nothing now that the reading is over. We all walk looking out to sea. It is crashing in the evening light, great splashing white horses running over the sand.

  “What were you and H. K. Thomson talking about?” I ask.

  “He told me he hadn’t read any of my books. He said he’s sorry but he will try to get around to it sometime,” says my mother, and then erupts in peals of laughter. It falls across the summer twilight like bells.

  And suddenly I think of the Christmas Eve when my mother and I were to help Nellie Phipps ring our church’s bells at exactly midnight. Nellie watched the time but suddenly the bells of the other church in town, St. Matthew’s, started pealing and she grabbed the ropes frantically. She mustn’t be late, she said, charged with this sacred duty. She rang so hard and so fast to catch up that her efforts didn’t seem humanly possible and my mother and I watched her in awe, not even touching the ropes. “God help me. God help me,” Nellie said, and it looked as if her prayers were answered because she no longer needed us. When we had practiced earlier in the day it had taken three of us on a rope. Now she was pulling both ropes herself. My mother put a hand on my shoulder as if protecting me from something that could not be explained.

  I remind my mother of this. How maybe it was an indication of Nellie’s mysticism.

  “What I always wondered was why it never occurred to her that St. Matthew’s was simply ringing their bells too early,” says my mother.

  Now within the roar of the surf and the roar of the wind we are surrounded by something so sonorous it presses out all thought. Even this new idea about Nellie. It is like being within the sound of the bells again. How do people live who do not live by the sea? How do people live without this sonorous presence? Then we are at the house and my feet feel the welcoming painted wood floors of the porch and I know the sonorous thing is in our porch floors too. My feet reach for it.

  “It’s always good to come home,” says my mother, sighing, and she picks up Hershel and carries him into the house, his chocolate mouth resting against her clean white blouse.

  The Rescue

  My Fifth
Adventure

  I am awoken by Ginny tapping on the window. I get up and raise the window sash and she climbs in.

  “I have an idea,” she says.

  We go down the hall to the kitchen. My mother has been up picking raspberries and the kitchen smells like raspberry muffins. There is a basket of them on the kitchen table. There are a jam jar of roses and a pitcher of milk next to the muffins. My mother has a pot of raspberry jam started on the stove. She has been busy already by daybreak.

  I suddenly wonder where the roses came from. We have none growing around our house and that is when I see my mother and H. K. Thomson sitting on the beach, talking.

  “What’s he doing here?” Ginny asks.

  “I think he’s taking my mother to lunch,” I say.

  “But it’s breakfast time,” says Ginny.

  We sit down and eat muffins with an open jar of my mother’s strawberry jam. There is a whole row of them in the pantry. Then Maya comes in looking all sleepy and we pour her a glass of milk and put a muffin on a plate for her.

  “What’s your idea?” I ask Ginny.

  She empties her pockets onto the kitchen table. “My quarters from my New York jar,” she says. Because Ginny wants to be a dress designer when she grows up, she is saving up her spare quarters to go to New York and scope things out. She says she may go to dress designer college or she may just muscle her way into the business. She is thinking about it still, and planning.

  “That’s your New York money,” I say, and put another muffin on each of our plates.

  “Not anymore,” says Ginny.

  Maya brings Ginny pen and paper and while Ginny talks she draws beautiful, fantastic outfits for Maya’s paper dolls.

  “Now, listen,” Ginny goes on. She leans on the table with one forearm and puts her face close to mine, staring me hard in the eye. “Here is how we stave off Mrs. Gourd. When we meet her in the parking lot, we give her all my New York money as a down payment and we tell her we will keep paying her off so long as she tells absolutely no one about the dropped Bible. Then we just find jobs, is all.”

  I am touched by Ginny’s giving up her quarters for me as much as I am aware that this is just one more person whose life I have potentially derailed.

  I get changed quickly with Maya clinging to Ginny and begging her not to leave. Maya stands pathetically with her face pressed against the screen door but we turn our backs and run across the sand.

  The air smells this morning like it has just come out of the wash. The sun is still low, casting white, opaque light. The ocean is quiet but beginning to whoosh as if it is getting in gear for the things it has planned for our day. As if it is time’s great internal-combustion engine. The mist patches run across the wet sand, late to work. It is commuting mist.

  We sit on the cement dividers all morning and Mrs. Gourd still does not come. We have not taken sunscreen because somehow I thought Mrs. Gourd was coming at daybreak. Like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It is past noon when we see her old green station wagon pull up. All the little Gourds are in tow, armed with sand toys. They are already slapping each other with their shovels. The baby makes not a peep. It has a blanket over its carrier again. I wonder if this is like riding in a litter.

  Mrs. Gourd looks like she is going right past us and down to the beach but Ginny stops her with a raised hand.

  “Mrs. Gourd!” she calls. “I have a proposition.”

  There is a man sitting on a cement divider in another part of the parking lot and he looks up with curiosity. He has been sitting there for the last ten minutes smoking cigarettes as if he, like us, is waiting for someone. But now when he looks at us it is as if he is satisfied; he was just waiting for something and all of us are as good as anything.

  Mrs. Gourd stops and looks at Ginny. “A what?” she asks.

  Ginny gets out her two handfuls of quarters. “These are for you,” she says.

  “What for?” asks Mrs. Gourd but before she gets the answer, takes and pockets them.

  “For your baby,” Ginny says. “Instead of going to see Mrs. Fielding, why don’t you deal directly with us? Mrs. Fielding has no money anyway.”

  “You again!” Mrs. Gourd says to Ginny. “You in that contraption dropping Bibles with this one?” She points at me.

  “I am Jane’s friend,” says Ginny. Everything is in this statement. “We will make payments until we pay off whatever you and Jane decide is fair. The only thing is, you can’t tell Mrs. Fielding or anyone anything about the baby. If you do, we get all our money back.”

  “Where you going to get the money?” asks Mrs. Gourd. She puts the baby carrier down and stares challengingly at us.

  “We’ll get jobs,” says Ginny.

  “Pfff,” says Mrs. Gourd, picking up the baby carrier again and letting her eyes drop to me. They are like knives. “You can’t get no jobs.”

  “We’ll get babysitting jobs,” says Ginny. “I’ve had the Red Cross babysitting course. You can make a lot of money babysitting.”

  Mrs. Gourd looks out over the sand. Her eyes start doing that thing again, moving back and forth, cranking her brain into gear.

  “Babysitting?” she says.

  “Uh-huh,” says Ginny.

  Mrs. Gourd’s eyes dart, dart. “You babysit for me,” she says.

  “WHAT?” cries Ginny. She eyes those smelly, runny Gourd children.

  “That’s what I said. You babysit for me. I want that job coming open at the Bluebird Café. That waitress job. You babysit for me and I’ll think about letting you pay off the debt this way. For now.”

  “I don’t know,” says Ginny. “How many hours a day is that? We’ve got school in the fall, you know.”

  “Well, we worry about that in the fall,” says Mrs. Gourd. Her mouth is closing in kind of a happy smile like she has opened chocolates and found one she likes. That is when I notice that among her other difficulties she has one long, yellow snaggle-tooth that sticks out from under her upper lip and sort of hangs there, threatening to pierce her lower lip. I can see her using it to poke holes in chocolates to suck out the filling and see if she likes it. She barks at me, “YOU’D BETTER,” as if I were thinking of saying no, and I can’t tell her I was just staring at the snaggle-tooth.

  “Oh, I will,” I say. I will promise anything if she just doesn’t talk to my mother. If she just doesn’t sue us.

  I can’t figure out whether the man with the cigarettes is close enough to hear us. I realize suddenly the importance of keeping this whole thing contained. So far only Dr. Callahan, Ginny, Mrs. Gourd and I know what I have done, although it feels as if everyone in town knows. As if it is written all over me. It was an accident. It was really Nellie’s fault. I explain this mentally to people over and over.

  I search for signs that the cigarette man has overheard us but he isn’t looking our way while he smokes, although his ears are perked like a dog’s. He gets into his car and drives away. Who comes to the beach just to sit in the parking lot and smoke?

  Mrs. Gourd grabs me by the chin and swings my face back around toward her. “You start now. I won’t tell no one about what you done or what’s it done to Willie Mae and you don’t tell no one about our deal either. You tell someone and it’s off and I will go get my fancy lawyer to talk to your mother and then it’s all up with you, ain’t it?”

  She puts the baby carrier in my hand and gives Ginny the diaper bag and then she starts to stump back toward her car.

  Ginny and I run after her. We don’t even know the children’s names, we say. The Gourd children go wild and start running all over the beach. Mrs. Gourd points out Darsie, Dee Dee, Darvon and Dean. I wonder if she ran out of D names when she got to Willie Mae or just got tired of them.

  “Wait a second,” yells Ginny. “When are you getting back? What do we feed them?”

  “You take them on back to the trailer and give them peanut butter and jelly when they get hungry but don’t take none for yourself. I ain’t a restaurant. Baby’s bottle is in t
he diaper bag and there’s an extra in the fridge,” says Mrs. Gourd, and then gets in her car, and the tires squeal as she pulls away.

  I am so relieved it has been this easy that I almost faint. At the same time I worry that we are just delaying the inevitable. That eventually we will be caught.

  “I’m sorry about your quarters,” I say to Ginny. “I’m sorry about everything.”

  “There’s something not right here,” says Ginny. “She leapt on that deal too fast.”

  But we have no time to think about it because the Gourd children have seen that their mother has left and are going crazy on the beach, running into the water and in all different directions, and we have a terrible time roping them in. Then Ginny teaches me how to change a diaper and what to do if a child is choking and other things she has learned in her course. It helps to pass the time, which moves more slowly than you would think possible. As if it is being weighted by all those Gourd children.

  “Do we have to do this for the rest of our lives, do you think? Does she plan to have us always babysit?” I ask as I get Darvon in one hand and Darsie in the other.

  “Well,” says Ginny, panting and grabbing Dean by the shirt, “eventually they have to grow up.”

  It is a long, exhausting afternoon but by four o’clock we have a rule that works. When we say drop everything, the Gourd children have to freeze, and they aren’t allowed to move until we touch them. We make a game of this. I cannot help feeling this is going to work only until they get tired of the game but it is enough for now. They are hungry and Dee Dee hits Darvon.

  “All of you follow me. We are taking you home and feeding you peanut butter,” says Ginny. She doesn’t talk to them in the sweet voice she uses for Max and Hershel and Maya. They trail her in a bedraggled line, too tired to be wild anymore.