Also Known As Harper

by Ann Haywood Leal

  I opened my notebook and took the light blue paper from the pocket inside the front cover.

  This year, no whiskey-soaked pen would get in the way of my entry form.

  I hugged my notebook. This year’s collection was shaping up to be the best bunch of poems I’d ever written. And I’d even be throwing in a short story at the end, to show those judges I meant business.

  Chapter Seven

  “WAKE UP, HARPER LEE. I need you to listen to me for a minute.” It was Mama’s voice, all right, but it was hard to make out the shape of Mama, because my eyes still thought it was the middle of the night.

  And sure enough, when I rolled over to face the red electric numbers on the Knotty Pine alarm clock, I could see it was only two minutes past three o’clock. “You okay, Mama?” I sat up on my elbows. “You sick or something?”

  “No, Harper, I’m fine.” She pushed a piece of hair to the side of my face. “I need you to do me a favor, is all.”

  Hem kicked me in his sleep, and I gave his legs a good push so they were hanging partway off the other side of the bed. I could smell coffee from the little drip machine on top of the short box refrigerator next to the door.

  “I need you to take care of Hemingway for me today.” She sat down on my side of the bed and buttoned the top button on her fisherman’s knit sweater.

  “Can’t you take him with you like usual?” I yanked a couple of feet of blanket over to my side.

  She shook her head. “I have to go right now. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you last night, but I fell dead asleep before I got to it. Girl that opens the Laundromat has been getting there late for the past couple of weeks. Word has it she didn’t even show yesterday. So I’m going to go down there and see if I can’t pick up the extra job.”

  I looked over at Hemingway. “It’s hard to get ready for school with him underfoot.”

  I guess it was right then and there that I knew something was up. The air between Mama and me seemed to get stuffier all of a sudden, and she wouldn’t look at me.

  “Well, that’s just it, Harper Lee.” Her eyes were darting all over the place, like Hem’s did when he was doing something he knew was wrong. “I have to go right over to my housecleaning job after the Laundromat. I’ll be late if I come back here to get Hem.” She finally looked me in the eye. “You know I wouldn’t ask this of you if I didn’t absolutely have to.”

  Now it was me that wouldn’t look at her straight-on.

  “Listen, Harper. I don’t have time to be driving you to school today, anyway.”

  “I don’t need you to drive me, Mama.” I knew I was whining like Hem now, but I couldn’t help myself. “I’ll just stand up on the main road and flag down a school bus.”

  But she was already partway through the door. “Put on the chain lock when I leave.”

  I got up to go to the door, and she turned and looked back at me. “For heaven’s sakes. Give me a break here, Harper. It’s only one day. And this is for all of us.”

  I nodded. “All right.” I said it, but nothing really was right at all.

  She reached out and put her hand on my cheek. It was cool against my warm face, and it always made me feel better when she did that.

  “I’m not sure how long I’ll be,” she said. “I might have to work into the evening. There’s some bologna and cheese in the little fridge, and half a loaf of bread on the table.” Then she blew me a kiss and pulled the door shut behind her.

  I pulled the covers back up and tried to go back to sleep, but my mind wouldn’t let me. Looking at Hemingway all sprawled out and sleeping so nicely caused the angry worry to simmer up again. It was slow in coming, and it made my muscles go stiff and tight. I was thinking for a quick second that I might not even like Hem, but I knew that was only the Daddy part of me coming out. My teacher said people are born with a little something from both parents. I was always hoping my Mama part would shine through.

  I wanted to run after Mama and tell her I wouldn’t do it. I had waited a whole year for that poetry contest to come around again, and I couldn’t be staying home for Hemingway, even for one day. I wanted to do it, but my legs stayed put, because Mama was long gone by then.

  The motel VACANCY sign outside the window was looking like Winnie Rae Early when she was trying to get into someone’s business, flashing and moving all around in bursts of speed. When Mama had closed the door, the bottom edge of the curtain had blown up on the windowsill, and the sign was flashing red neon bursts on the top of my poetry notebook.

  There was less than a week until the contest and I hadn’t even gotten started with the proofreading. Teachers and parents had to proofread every poem and story, not just for spelling errors and such, but because of Worley Buckley’s use of profanity in the contest two years ago. He had gotten up to the microphone to read his first piece, and no one could get to him fast enough.

  It was about his grandma, which seemed like a nice, safe subject, so no one saw it coming. I could remember almost word for word how it started:

  My grandma, she lived all alone.

  She had company, but now she has none.

  She took meals with her talking dog, Bart,

  but her cooking made the two of them fart.

  He’d sniff and he’d smell,

  Then he’d say, “What the—”

  Worley Buckley got a good solid handful of dirty words out before the vice-principal hauled him, by the hood of his sweatshirt, out the side door of the auditorium.

  I sat down at the round table by the window with my notebook and thought on what to write. Hem breathed out a choppy snore and broke my concentration.

  And that’s when I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She stood in the middle of the parking lot outside. The “C” in the middle of the sign flashed orangey red on the side of her face and her whole pink stocking cap seemed to light up.

  She looked old, but not wobbly grandma old. She had a wheelchair, but she didn’t sit and ride. She stood and pushed. And when it came down to it, she wouldn’t have had any room to sit, even if she’d wanted to. The seat was piled high with grocery bags, only they didn’t seem to be filled with food of any sort. In fact, I could see a chair leg poking out of the top of one of them.

  She was wearing a suit. A man’s business suit, like the kind the school principal wore. And she had pajamas on over the top, and some bedroom slippers to go with it all.

  She must’ve known how hard I was looking, because she turned that wheelchair clean around and pushed her gray hair to the sides of her face as if to get a better look going. She didn’t get any closer to my window. She stayed under that flashing VACANCY sign and stared. She held her eyes there for a good long while before she slowly turned and wheeled off across the parking lot, as if she was starting out fresh with another day.

  The thing is, a person might think getting stared down like that would be downright creepy. But not from this old lady. I didn’t know what it was, but looking at her got my brain going every which way, thinking about this and that, and it put me in the right mind for some good poetry writing.

  Soon as I got the title in my head, all the rest of the words followed right after it.

  Also Known As Harper

  by Harper Lee Morgan

  I have been Harper Lee Morgan

  Mostly all of my life.

  The way I figure

  That name has soaked itself into my bones.

  Lately, though,

  I’ve been figuring on something different.

  Something without the Daddy part hooked on.

  Being just plain Harper Lee

  Might help my brother know

  It’s time to come in from that long wait on the porch.

  Being just plain Harper Lee

  Might help my mama know

  It’s not her fault Flannery never opened her eyes.

  It’d be nice to start out fresh

  Without the ragged part of me

  Tagging along behind.

  C
hapter Eight

  HEMINGWAY SAT SIDEWAYS in the doorway of the motel room, with one foot in and one foot out. “You having school at home today, too, Harper Lee?” He wore the red T-shirt and grubby jeans he’d had on yesterday, but I had too much on my mind to bother him about it.

  “I guess so.” I was trying not to think about what I was missing. Mrs. Rodriguez had said just yesterday that a teacher could only do so much, and if we didn’t hand in our poems to her soon, she wouldn’t have enough time to proofread them all. We’d be plain out of luck.

  “What we going to start on first?” He licked at a crumbly corner of his graham cracker.

  Watching him talk with the light brown cakey stuff in the corners of his mouth usually didn’t bother me one bit. But today it was making me cranky mad. “You’d better close that door, Hemingway, or we’re going to be getting some giant bugs in here.” I said that last part on purpose, because I was still feeling pretty ugly, and I knew how much he hated june bugs and cockroaches and such.

  He slammed that door so fast, he practically took his own toe off in the process. “She was out there again.”

  “Who?” I ran my hand over the long bumps of rust corduroy on the bedspread.

  He opened the little square refrigerator and took out a package of cheese. “The old lady.” He smelled a square of cheese and licked the clear cellophane on the outside. “She was wheeling around the parking lot when we got here. Didn’t you see her?”

  I shook my head. “Not when we first got here.”

  “Then I saw her again last night.” He slowly peeled back the wrapper on the cheese. “She was by our window when I got up to go to the bathroom.”

  So he’d seen her, too. I hoped he wasn’t planning on trying to talk to her. I wanted to be the one to talk to her, but I was picking and choosing my words. I wanted to ask her about what she was carrying around in that wheelchair, but she was looking like a person that kept things private. I’d have to think real careful on what I was going to say.

  Hemingway took a big bite of his cheese and pointed at a bottom corner of the window. “That kid needs to wipe his nose.”

  A grubby face about the size of Hemingway’s was pressed up against the glass. Hands were cupped around the eyes as if he was trying to see inside our room better.

  I put on my Mama face and waved the kid away, but he didn’t budge. He was mouthing something I couldn’t quite make out.

  Hem must have understood some of it, because, the next thing I knew, he had opened the door and was waving the kid inside.

  “I can’t play with you until you wipe your nose.” Hemingway handed the kid the box of tissues from the little table.

  The kid shrugged and reached for a tissue. “Okay.” He blew his nose real hard, and when he wiped away a good portion of the dirt on the bottom half of his face, I could see he had a nice little smile. The kind of smile that made you like him, even if you hadn’t planned on it.

  Smack-dab in the middle of his shirt was a stick-on name tag with RANDALL KELLEY written in thick red marker. The sides were all peeled up, and it looked to be getting ready to come off.

  It wasn’t until he sat himself down at our table and lit into our box of graham crackers that I noticed the girl that had stepped in behind him. She seemed to be my age around about the face, but I knew her mama would never be needing to take up any of her hems. We probably weighed near about the same, but she had a good solid foot on me.

  “Hey,” I said.

  There was something friendly and kind about the way her eyes crinkled up when she smiled, and she looked to be the sort of person you could trust. The sort of person that would appreciate a good poem.

  “She doesn’t talk.” Randall had helped himself to the graham-cracker box, and he was pulling at the waxy flap of a new package. “Her name’s Lorraine.”

  “Hey, Lorraine.” I tried to make my eyes look crinkly and friendly. “I’m Harper Lee.” I pointed behind me. “Hemingway. But we usually call him Hem.” I felt my face get all hot when I realized what I’d just said. If Lorraine didn’t talk, she wouldn’t be calling Hemingway much of anything.

  “How come she doesn’t talk?” Hemingway grabbed the graham-cracker package back.

  Randall shrugged. “She’s not retarded or anything. Mama says she’s just choosing her words carefully. Some people don’t run off at the mouth at the drop of a hat.”

  I thought about Winnie Rae Early and I nodded. It might be nice to be around someone who was more careful with her words.

  “She used to talk.” Randall tilted his head up and to the side like he was remembering. “But one day, a year ago, she just stopped.”

  I looked at Lorraine, but her eyes had found the cover of my poetry notebook as if Randall wasn’t right then talking about her personal business. Her fingers were following the swirly design I’d made with my purple marking pen.

  Hem pointed at a corner of Randall’s name tag. “All the sticky’s gone off of it. Might as well just throw it away.”

  He shook his head. “Can’t. Mama will get mad.” He tried to smooth a corner back down with his thumb. “She puts them on everything. She’s hoping it will make Lorraine find her words.”

  Lorraine didn’t seem as if she had lost much of anything. From the way she looked about the eyes, I was without a doubt sure that she had plenty of words moving around inside her head.

  She lifted the corner on the cover of my poetry notebook and leaned toward me with her eyebrows raised high.

  I nodded. “Sure, go right ahead.” I liked to watch what people did when they read my poems, how their shoulders and their eyes moved. I wanted to know if they felt the same way when they read them as I did when I was writing the words.

  She turned the pages slowly until she got to the poem I wrote last August. Back when Mama took me school shopping at the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store.

  I watched Lorraine’s eyes move across the page and I read the words in my mind.

  Some people like things shiny and crisp

  But I tend to like the things with the scraped up edges.

  That way I can tell other people have liked them too.

  They’ve torn them and spilled on them

  Or broken off a corner or two

  As they went about the important business

  Of their day.

  Something smooth and straight and new

  Has an emptiness about it

  Because it hasn’t been important

  To anyone yet.

  Lorraine looked up at me and smoothed down her skirt that used to be bright purple. She smiled part of a smile, and I knew she was going to be my friend.

  Chapter Nine

  I WATCHED RANDALL as he sat down on the end of the bed and opened Hemingway’s handwriting book. As soon as he started moving in that direction, I knew what would happen next.

  Sure enough, Hemingway pulled it quickly out of his hands. He was real private about his letters, especially his “b”s, which he sometimes got mixed up with his “d”s and “p”s. “What grade you in?” Hem asked him.

  Randall wrinkled his nose. “I guess you could say I’m in the second grade.” He glanced at Lorraine. “But I never actually finished the first grade and we didn’t ever get a chance to sign me up for school here.” His eyes lit on Hem’s handwriting book. “Mama said we were taking our summer vacation early last year, because we’re going up north. There’s a special doctor up there that’s going to help Lorraine find her words.”

  Lorraine’s hands got shaky right down to the fingertips when he said that, and her eyebrows narrowed and scrunched together as if Randall’s words made her nervous and upset, all at the same time.

  Hem didn’t seem to notice one little bit. His shoulders got droopy when Randall mentioned the part about going up north, as if they’d been best friends for years or something.

  “So you’ll be moving on in the morning, I s’pose,” Hem said.

  But Randall sat back against the radi
ator, looking like he wasn’t in any hurry at all. “We ran out of money a while back.” He put his hands out wide. “Mama said we were going to hang around here for a while.”

  Hem looked toward the window. “Your mama outside?”

  Randall shook his head. “She’s off running her errands.” He kicked against the front of the tan metal radiator with his heel. “We’re not going anywhere just yet. She said we’re sitting tight here for a bit. Until she can think on what to do.”

  “Just like us!” Hem acted as if waiting on money was something fun and exciting.

  But I knew the truth, and I could tell by the sad worry in Lorraine’s hands that she knew it, too.

  She folded and unfolded her hands in front of her, as if she couldn’t find the proper place for them.

  I looked at Flannery’s sweater, laid out on top of the three-legged stool. Everything we’d hauled with us was stacked up against the side wall. At our house, I’d never had to think about what to do with anything. Everything had a closet or a drawer.

  Lorraine opened the door and leaned out, shading her eyes with her hand. She turned to Randall and motioned him toward the door with her other hand.

  “Is it our turn?” Randall stuffed another graham cracker into his pocket and headed for the door.

  Lorraine turned to me with her crinkly-eye smile and waved.

  “Hold on.” Randall skipped back toward our bathroom.

  He came out with a bar of soap and one of the little white shampoo bottles. “Can I have these?” He held them up carefully, as if they were fragile dishes. “I’ll bring back the extra.”

  I looked at the tiny dirt streaks about the sides of his face. Maybe Mrs. Early was getting skimpy with the shampoo when she scrubbed out the tub in their motel room. “Wait a second.” I reached behind the chair for my soda-cracker box, where I kept the sunflower toilet water and fancy hair conditioner I’d gotten on my last birthday. I held them out to Lorraine. “Here. Use what you need and give the rest back later.”