Next to the parking lot, an outfit from Iowa was setting up a merry-go-round and tilt-a-whirl. Tomorrow the park would ring with the drunken clangor and wheeze of carnival music.
“Don’t get in the men’s way,” Mama warned as I trailed off with Sally Wheeler and several others, to watch the merry-go-round taking form. We sat on the grass, shielding our eyes from the sun and marveling as, magically, the parts fit together into a toy overwhelmingly grand. Its prancing horses and bounding lions, were mythic; its flashing mirrors and portraits of Arthurian beauties, crushingly splendid. I was deliciously oppressed as the foreshadowing limits of time and money clashed with my inexhaustible desire to ride, to be a part of the machine.
Simply witnessing its assembly, I was overcome. The merry-go-round was part of the land beyond the larkspur and hollyhocks, in the banjo clock. But it was a part capable of passing from that Elysian field to this world of heat and dust. And while I rode, it carried me with it into the valley of dreams.
With the idea of splashing in the water around the dock, Sally and I trotted off to the bathhouse after lunch to change into our bathing suits. The lake was still very cold, so we played in the shallows, collecting pretty stones and trying to catch minnows in our hands. Two or three times we found tiny leeches clinging to our feet, and we ran to Mama, who sprinkled them with salt and brushed them off.
Mama had spread an old blanket on the grass for Sally and me, and when we tired of playing in the water, we collapsed on the blanket to watch the grown-ups work. How satisfying to be a grown-up, allowed to work morning till night at real work instead of pretending. Of course, Mama let me do simple chores like dusting and carrying the slop pails, but I still couldn’t bake a pie or sew a dress. Or decorate a baked goods booth with crêpe-paper flowers, as Mama was doing. How powerful a person who could do that sort of job must feel.
Mama, Bernice McGivern, Stella Wheeler, and Maxine, Bernice’s sister, were going to run the baked goods booth. Stella Wheeler had asked to be on the baked goods committee, although she was “the worst baker in town,” according to Mama. “The woman can’t boil water without burning it,” she said. Still, Mama was not disposed to say no. “Stella Wheeler needs to work in the baked goods booth,” Mama explained, “for her nerves.”
“Nerves” must be what caused Mrs. Wheeler to cry so often, and to sometimes talk too much and other times not talk at all. What were nerves? Mama said they were not catching. On the telephone to Bernice McGivern, Mama said of Stella Wheeler, “She’s not more than thirty-five, but I think she’s having her change already.” Mama had been in a hurry when I asked her what Mrs. Wheeler’s change was. “Oh, honey,” she’d said, “it’s when ladies stop having babies.”
I wrote it down in the notebook. Did a lady decide one day that she wouldn’t have any more babies, or did the stork decide not to deliver them, or did God decide not to send them? And why would that give a lady nerves unless, maybe, she grew sad thinking of the cute little babies who would go to live at someone else’s house. If Mama had already had her change, would I have gone to live with someone else? With Cynthia Eggers? And when Mama saw me, would she have recognized me or known that I could have been her little girl if she hadn’t changed? I saw how it was possible that such a change could make a lady nervous.
I hoped that Mrs. Wheeler didn’t run across a baby at the picnic who looked too familiar. That would start her crying.
I was fond of Sally’s mama, and I thought she was pretty, although she never wore makeup. She’d look like a movie star if she wore some. I didn’t think it was a practice to which she was morally opposed. It was something that didn’t occur to her. Just as paying a lot of attention to clothes didn’t occur to her. She had other things on her mind. Many things, painful things, it seemed.
Mrs. Wheeler had crisp black hair that fell in waves to her shoulders, though she usually kept it pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck with a narrow black ribbon. Her eyes were large and shining and slightly hooded. The irises were a deep, periwinkle blue. She was too thin for her own good, Mama said, but I liked the way her clothes fell along the sharp planes of her body, like heavy rain sheeting down a windowpane.
“Your mama’s pretty,” I told Sally.
She shrugged.
“Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“I just wish she wouldn’t cry so much.”
“Is your papa coming to the picnic?”
“Yes,” she answered excitedly, sitting up. “He promised to take me on the tilt-a-whirl.” Sally’s papa traveled, selling office supplies. He was gone all week. That was sad. It was also true, however, that he never spanked her, and I think that was because he was away so much.
When we grew tired of watching the women, Sally and I took our old coffee cans and tablespoons, and meandered back down to the water’s edge to dig in the sand. Some children were playing tag among the picnic tables. Ronald Oster and Leroy Mosely were playing cops and robbers among the trees beyond the bathhouse.
“Are you going to watch the parade tomorrow?” Sally asked.
“I think so. We always do.” It wasn’t a very big parade. The local American Legion unit and auxiliary led the procession. They were followed by a handful of non-Legion veterans, who enjoyed showing off their uniforms once or twice a year. Hilly Stillman was one of these. Then came the high school band, three or four majorettes in front, twirling their batons and strutting smartly, like circus ponies. After the band, last year’s homecoming queen and her attendants rode by in an open car, borrowed from somebody in St. Bridget. The girls wore formal dresses overlaid with pink or blue or yellow tulle, and corsages of red roses. A gaggle of kids wheeling along in broken ranks on crêpe-paper-decorated bicycles were next, and behind them others pulled crying baby brothers or sisters in similarly decked-out wagons. Finally, the hearse, sporting American flags and bunting, crept along in the rear, maybe to pick up anyone who dropped dead in the parade. Once around the schoolhouse block, and then down Main Street as far as the railroad tracks, that was the route.
I liked the majorettes best. Their white boots with tassels on them made my pulse quicken. If I had white boots with tassels, I would wear them all the time. For Christmas I was going to ask Santa to bring me a baton. Maybe someone would teach me how to twirl it. It didn’t look so hard. If I twirled it very well, I might be asked to be in the parade, and if I were in the parade, maybe Mama would buy me white boots with tassels.
It was not only Sally and I who were thinking about the parade. I found a leech between my toes, and when we skipped back to the baked goods stall to have Mama put salt on it, Cynthia Eggers was chatting with Mama about the parade.
“Marilyn wanted a new formal, so we had to make a trip to Minneapolis this week.” Marilyn was Mrs. Eggers’s daughter. She was last fall’s homecoming queen and would be riding in the open car tomorrow. “At first I said no, but Marilyn said she’d be needing a new formal for college anyway. Well, that’s true. She’s going off to the university. So, we got her a beautiful rose satin that’s really too sophisticated for Harvester, but it was what she wanted.” Mrs. Eggers sighed. She enjoyed being Marilyn Eggers’s mother. She enjoyed the small discomforts and inconveniences, the imagined embarrassments. She could stand all day without boredom or weariness in front of the mirror that was Marilyn.
“I only wish,” Cynthia Eggers continued, “that Helen Stillman had the sense to keep Hillyard at home.”
“What?” Mrs. Wheeler looked up from the green crêpe paper she was twisting into flower stems.
“He ruins the parade every year. We have company coming from Mankato, and I’m going to be humiliated.”
“But he’s a war hero,” Mrs. Wheeler observed, “a genuine war hero.”
“That was a long time ago,” Mrs. Eggers pointed out. “Now he’s a nuisance. Poor Marilyn will just die if he does some awful thing this year. And you know he will, he always does.”
“What does Marilyn care?” Sally’s mama aske
d, looking increasingly distracted. The question was notably out of character for Mrs. Wheeler, who was not confrontational.
“What does she care?” Cynthia Eggers repeated, beginning to show irritation.
“Yes,” Mrs. Wheeler pressed. “The parade isn’t about Marilyn. It’s about soldiers who have fought for their country. Think of how insignificant Marilyn’s embarrassment is compared to what Hilly and his mother have suffered.”
Cynthia Eggers turned on her heel and marched away, her back as straight and stiff as any soldier’s. Mrs. Wheeler looked blankly after her and started to cry.
“Jesus Christ,” said Sally.
13
MRS. WHEELER COULDN’T STOP crying.
“I’ll take her home,” Mama told Bernice McGivern, “and then I’ll be back.”
“Stay as long as you need. I can take care of things here.”
We headed for the Oldsmobile. People either stared at us or conspicuously didn’t. Sally and her mama had ridden out with us, and now we were taking them home. Stella sat in the front seat beside Mama and wept quietly. Her shoulders didn’t heave, her face did not contort. She stared ahead of her in a state of mild perplexity, the source of her sorrow lying too deep for examination.
In the backseat, Sally sat on the floor, her knees drawn up in a tight, angry package. She wanted no one to see her in the car with her mother. How could her mother do this, humiliate her in front of half the parish? What was wrong with her mother that she could make such a spectacle of herself? I heard what Sally was thinking as clearly as if she’d shouted it.
The drive to town was unending. To fill the silence, Mama spoke casually to Mrs. Wheeler of unimportant matters. “I think I’ll get up early tomorrow to bake my pies. I’ve got twelve dozen cookies made up and packed. I made some double chocolate cookies and some molasses and ginger. The molasses and ginger cookies are from a recipe of my Aunt Geraldine’s.
“It’s turned so hot, I’m going to get out my summer clothes. I’ve got a pink cotton with a white sailor collar that’s kind of dressy, but not too dressy. I think I’ll wear that. And my white pumps. Now that it’s Memorial Day, we can wear our white pumps.”
Mama glanced at Mrs. Wheeler. From where I sat, behind Mama, I could see the tears still falling from Mrs. Wheeler’s chin.
“My sister Betty’s expecting a baby around the first of July. Lark and I are going to take the train in a couple of weeks and go stay with her till after the baby comes. I wonder what they’ll name it. This is their first.” And so on.
Before we reached the Wheelers’ house, Mama asked, “Is your papa home, Sally?”
“She’s nodding her head yes,” I told Mama.
As the car pulled up in front of the house, Mama said to Mrs. Wheeler, “I wish you wouldn’t take it so hard. You were absolutely right to call Cynthia Eggers on what she said.”
But the perplexity on Mrs. Wheeler’s face deepened. She wasn’t crying about Cynthia Eggers, it said. Mama patted Mrs. Wheeler’s hand, then opened the door and got out to escort Stella Wheeler and Sally to the house. From the backseat, Sally grabbed her doll and the dress she had worn to the lake over her bathing suit. Mama opened the back door and Sally left without a word.
How cheerless and solitary Sally and her mother each looked, drifting up the walk to the front door, Mama behind them, carrying Mrs. Wheeler’s purse.
On the floor of the car was a coffee can full of stones Sally had collected at the lake. “Wait,” I called and ran after her with the can. “Here are your pretty stones.” Sally took the can and looked at the stones, now dry and dull, their greens and pinks and blues faded to powdery gray.
“I don’t want them,” she said. “You keep them.”
Mr. Wheeler appeared at the door. Mama told him, “Stella’s not feeling well so we brought her home.”
Mr. Wheeler didn’t look surprised. He looked tired and weighed down. When we had turned Mrs. Wheeler and Sally over to his care, and the three of them had disappeared into the house, I set the can of stones on the bottom step. Tomorrow Sally might want to pour water over them and bring back their colors.
• • •
We stood on Main Street in front of Johnson’s Chevrolet and Buick, the noon sun beating hard and hot on our shoulders and on our scalps where our hair was parted.
Bill McGivern marched by with the American Legion, and Bernice McGivern stepped smartly along in the auxiliary. Bill smiled and Bernice waved. The majorettes twirled and glittered, exotic butterflies amid a flock of plain moths. The tassels on their freshly whitened boots danced and spun. Was there any chance that Santa would bring boots as well as a baton?
Here was Hilly, uniform fresh and neat. My, but he looked handsome in his tunic, marching along with the other soldiers who weren’t legionnaires. He had difficulty keeping in step, and of course his gait was lurching due to his bad foot, but he made a great effort to conform. He didn’t break rank, dashing ahead of the band and waving his arms, as he had the year before last. Nor did he jog alongside the Homecoming Queen’s open car, polishing the fenders, as he had last year.
“Mama, Hilly’s doing real good, isn’t he? Do you think he’s getting sane?”
Mama waved to Hilly. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “He looks scared and sick to me. I don’t think he should have marched today.”
Hilly had performed quite respectably, though. Even Cynthia Eggers couldn’t complain.
Mrs. Stillman didn’t allow Hilly to attend the Knights of Columbus picnic. He couldn’t be trusted not to hurt himself on the merry-go-round or tilt-a-whirl. Mama and Papa and I had to dash away from the parade to reach Sioux Woman Lake with our pies and cookies before the picnic began at one o’clock. We would tell Hilly later how well he had marched.
“I feel sorry for Hilly,” I told Mama as I clambered into the back of the pickup to mind the baked goods during the ride. “He’s got no place to go but home.”
“Maybe we’ll bring him a little present from the picnic,” Mama said. “Be on the lookout for something he’d like.”
Jumping down from the back of the truck in the dusty parking lot, I heard Papa warn Mama, “I’d be careful if I were you. You treat him like he was anybody, but he’s crazy.”
“Shut up, Willie. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t come crying to me if something happens.”
“You’re the last person I’d come crying to,” Mama declared, reaching into the rear of the truck for pies. “Lark, can you carry this big box of cookies without falling down? Don’t dawdle. Willie, grab that second box of pies.”
Laughing, Bernice McGivern and her sister, Maxine, were setting out trays of cookies, cakes, bread, and pies. Some were under wax paper to keep off flies, some still in boxes, to be brought out as needed. Bernice and Maxine were wonderful laughers, and I liked to be near them to listen. But Mama didn’t want me hanging around during the first rush of customers buying dessert for their midday meal. She gave me some change and told me to buy a hot dog and something to drink. “Come back later and I’ll give you a piece of pie.”
“A grown-up piece?”
“Yes. If you’re good and don’t bother me.”
“Blueberry?”
“I’ll cut it and set it aside right now. Run along.”
“Do you think Mrs. Wheeler is going to come?”
“I… don’t know.”
There would be other first graders at the picnic, but none of them as close a friend as Sally. I bought a hot dog and a bottle of root beer, and sat on the grass where I could watch the merry-go-round. When I finished eating, I would find Papa and ask for money for a ride. Better get it now before he lost it at bingo. He’d headed in that direction. Last year he and Herbie Wendel and Lloyd Grubb and a couple of his other pals spent most of the day in the bingo tent.
The park was filling. Nearly everybody in Harvester showed up at the picnic. Even if they had to bum a ride with the neighbors and pack a lunch from
home, they came to sit on an old quilt and visit, or take a swim, or play horseshoes. Half of St. Bridget and Red Berry usually turned out, too. The parking lot was full, and cars were parking along the road leading back to town. I kept an eye out for Sally, but it didn’t look as though she was going to show up.
Beverly Ridza who was in my First Communion class collapsed beside me. She was wearing an old pair of overalls and nothing else but a little red barrette in her uncombed hair. “What you doing?” she asked.
“Eating.”
“Can I have some?”
I handed her the hot dog, and she took a healthy bite, washing it down with half the bottle of pop. Beverly had no manners, but Mama said it wasn’t Beverly’s fault. Beverly’s drunken, good-for-nothing papa had done a disappearing act, leaving Mrs. Ridza with three young ones to feed. Mama said Mrs. Ridza was short of cash and brains, and she did the best she could, cleaning people’s houses and taking handouts. Mama always sent the Ridzas an anonymous basket at Christmas, and she said she would take a brush to me if I told Beverly where it came from.
“You got any money?” Beverly asked.
“Not yet.”
“You gonna get any?”
“I guess.” I could see what was going to happen. Beverly was going to stick with me and ask for half my money. Maybe she’d get tired of following me around. “I’m going swimming now,” I told her getting to my feet.
“Where’s your suit?”
“In the truck. Where’s yours?”
“Don’t have none.”
There was the answer. She wouldn’t want to hang around and watch me having a good time, would she? But she followed me to the truck to fetch my new red-and-white polka dot bathing suit, bought at Lundeen’s Dry Goods.
Then she trailed me into the bathhouse and would have come right into the changing stall with me. “Don’t come in with me,” I told her. “I don’t like to undress in front of people.”
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