Home Free

by Sharon Jennings

  Then I pointed across the street. “The house with the big tree is where Susan lives. I either play with her a lot, or I don’t play with her at all. Her mother doesn’t like me, I can tell.”

  “How can you tell?” Cassandra asked.

  “Well, sometimes when Susan asks me to stay for lunch or for dinner or for breakfast Mrs. Tupper says in a very loud voice, ‘Doesn’t Lee have a home of her own? Tell her to eat there,’ like I can’t hear. I hate it when adults say things loud enough on purpose for me to hear.”

  Cassandra rolled her eyes. “Adults always say stuff like that in front of me. I’m an orphan. I don’t count.”

  “How inconsiderate,” I said. And I added, “And how inappropriate, too! When I have children I won’t say mean things. And get this. I hate margarine and Mrs. Tupper uses margarine, the kind in the bag with the red blob of color inside, and you have to squish it all around to make the margarine yellow. My mother says it costs less and Mrs. Tupper is cheap.”

  The biggest house is where Linda White lives. She is an only child. She wasn’t supposed to be an only child, but from what I have overheard from my Sanctuary, something is wrong with Mrs. White. My mother and Mrs. Fergus and Mrs. Carol and Mrs. Petovsky all talk about Mrs. White and my mother sniffs and everybody else raises their eyebrows a lot.

  So I told Cassandra, “I don’t know why they don’t like Mrs. White, but I know why they don’t like Linda. She always wants to play doctor. She’s always trying to get us to take our clothes off so the doctor can look at our bums. My mother caught us once and dragged me home and smacked my beee-hind with a hairbrush. She always calls it my beee-hind when she’s mad enough to spank me. She said we were dirty and filthy and we’d end up like so-called Mrs. Harris.”

  I showed Cassandra where Mrs. Butterfield lives.

  “She hits her kids all the time, but not like my mother wallops my beee-hind. None of her kids are old enough for me to play with so none of them are my friends, but I feel sorry for all of them. Sometimes they come to school with black eyes or bruises on their arms and they say they fell down the stairs. How can three kids fall down the stairs so many times all the time? My mother says it is none of my business. My mother also tells me to keep my hands to myself. One day I saw Mrs. Butterfield smack Laura across the mouth. I saw Laura’s eyes go all dark like the black part was running into the colored part and I heard Mrs. Butterfield say, ‘That’ll learn ya.’ I don’t know what Laura has to learn, but Mrs. Butterfield should learn to keep her hands to herself, even if it isn’t any of my business. The next day at school Laura was missing a tooth, and I gave her the dime I got from the tooth fairy for the tooth I lost that week. After I wondered if I should have given my dime to Donnie and Ronnie to beat up Mrs. Butterfield.”

  Cassandra Jovanovich had been walking slower and slower and I had to stop and wait for her to catch up. She had her arms crossed over her chest and she was glaring at me. “Do you ever stop talking?” she demanded. “Maybe I don’t care if some old witch hits her kids. I don’t even know them.”

  Well! I turned away and kept walking. She could follow me or not.

  And in a minute she tugged at my arm. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled behind her hair. “I just don’t like hearing about stuff like … like that. About hitting.”

  I linked arms with her. “I know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know that you don’t like it. I mean, I don’t like it either. And Mrs. Butterfield is a witch, you’re right. My mother smacks me sometimes, but not like Mrs. Butterfield. She hits.”

  Cassandra nodded.

  The hardest I ever got smacked was when I said a dirty word. I didn’t know it was a dirty word and I didn’t know I was going to say it. I just opened my mouth and the dirty word came out. I didn’t plan on it. And I didn’t know what it meant. Sometimes boys write it on fences, so maybe it just got lodged in my brain. My mother screamed and lurched toward me and chased me around the living room and the dining room and down the hall and into my bedroom. Then we went around the bed a few times before she caught me and took the hairbrush to my beee-hind. I sure wish I knew what that word meant. I guess I could have asked my father. When he came into my bedroom that night, he asked what I had said. I wouldn’t tell him. What if he got mad and chased me around the bed a couple more rounds? He said he’d heard all about it from my mom. Of course, my mother never says bad words, so she wouldn’t tell him what bad word I’d said. He kept asking and asking. Finally he said goodnight and told me not to worry. Mom would be fine in the morning. Well, that’s great. What about my beee-hind? Would it be fine in the morning? And then, as I was drifting off to sleep, I suddenly knew why my dad wanted to know. He probably wondered if it was one of the bad words he says all the time. I figured out that he was probably in trouble with my mother, too.

  “That’s Kathy’s house.” I pointed to the house with the blue door.

  We walked along for a couple more houses.

  “Well?” asked Cassandra Jovanovich.

  “Well what?”

  “Aren’t you going to go on and on and tell me everything there is to know about Kathy? About what her mom says to you and if they eat margarine?”

  I got it. “You’re making fun of me for talking so much.” I turned and stared at Kathy’s house. Then I kept walking.

  “I forgot. She hates you, right?”

  I kept walking.

  “Why does she hate you?”

  “Now who wants to ask questions?”

  We glared at each other. Cassandra looked away first. “I’m sorry.

  She looked so sad. Suddenly I blurted, “We were best friends. Now she hates me. That’s all.” I wasn’t going to say anything else, but the words came out. “Her dad is creepy. He has a collection of beer mugs and the handles are bare-naked ladies.”

  “Ewww.”

  “He used to give us Orange Crush in them and tell us we were drinking beer.”

  “And you had to hold the handles?”

  I nodded.

  “Ewww.”

  Then I remembered my vow. “I don’t want to talk about her,” I said. “From now on my lips are sealed.”

  By then we were at another Debbie’s house, Debbie Walker.

  “She has four brothers and sisters and a huge big boxer dog they call Tinkerbell, and I like her mother best. She makes Jell-O Popsicles and chocolate chip cookies almost every day and lets me eat as much as I want. And she lets me put sugar on grapefruit if I’m there for breakfast. Her kids also put sugar on tomatoes, but I think that’s just plain silly. Her house is always messy and smells like five kids have peed somewhere, not just in the toilet, and she never yells at me and she tells my mother I am very polite. My mother just sniffs. Her name, Debbie’s mother’s name, is Muriel. I think I will name one of my children Muriel. I am going to have five children. Which reminds me. Do you have brothers or sisters or are you an only orphan?”

  “Muriel is a nice name. Old-fashioned.”

  I had done it. Asked a question she wasn’t going to answer. So I started talking again. “For a long time I didn’t know what my mother’s name was. I mean, I knew people called her Marjorie but one day I suddenly realized that she had a name like I did, and she wasn’t just Mother. So I asked her, ‘Is Marjorie your name?’ And she said ‘None of your business.’ Why is it none of my business? Why are so many things none of my business? My mother says ‘None of your business’ all the time. When I grow up I want to know why.”

  “Rita,” said Cassandra Jovanovich.

  “What?”

  “My mother’s name is Rita.”

  She said it in such a strange way, like … like the name was something bad in her mouth and she had to spit it out. And I knew I couldn’t ask her why.

  “That’s a nice name,” I told her. I tried to make myself look all sorrowful and deeply understanding and considerate and thoughtful. “It sounds Spanish.”

  “I hate it.”

  Well, of course, I wanted to ask a questio
n.

  Good thing we were at the bookmobile.

  Chapter 7

  A bookmobile is a truck with books. A big truck, like you’d put your furniture in if you were moving. It goes around to places that don’t have a library built of bricks that stays put in one spot.

  Every Wednesday the bookmobile comes to the plaza near us. It has two doors, and you line up to get in one door and you leave by the other door. Only so many people can get in at one time because inside, the sides of the truck are lined with books, floor to ceiling. You make your choices and you give your card to the librarian at the other door. She writes down when your book is due back and if you’re late, you pay five cents. I am never late because I read all my books fast and I’m always waiting for next Wednesday.

  Miss Gowdy told us that we are very lucky. She told us that in some places in Africa the library is a camel that goes to the people who move about the desert. And in Lapland, the children have to take books out for six months because they’re with the reindeer for that long. That would leave me with five months, three weeks, and four days with nothing to read.

  I like the bookmobile. It smells like books. I’ve been to the stay-put kind of library but they don’t smell the same. I figure they’re too big and have too much space in them and then you can smell the people more than the books. And not everyone smells as nice as Miss Gowdy, let me tell you!

  I showed Cassandra where the children’s books are and I told the librarian that Cassandra Jovanovich was new. So the librarian gave her a form to fill out and I saw Cassandra go all red when she looked at it. She pushed her hair over her face and then she crumpled the form up and ran outside. But she didn’t know the rules so she ran out the door you come in and people yelled at her.

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run after her, but I wanted to get books, too. But with Cassandra gone, people were looking at me. I hurried down the truck and out the proper door.

  Cassandra was sitting on a bench near the fountain.

  “I hate filling in forms. They always ask about my parents. And where I live. I hate it.”

  I hadn’t thought about this. Book orphans never seem to mind that they’re orphans.

  “I’ve lived in so many different houses I can’t remember them all. I can’t remember the names of all the schools I’ve gone to. Sometimes I can’t remember the names of the relatives I’ve stayed with.”

  I hadn’t thought about this either. Then I realized that Cassandra’s life up to now was like Anne Shirley’s life before she went to Green Gables. She was always being passed around to lots of people who made her do lots of chores.

  “Why don’t you ever stay?” I asked.

  “They don’t want me. Sometimes I don’t want them. One time I wanted to stay. Philip and Cathy were nice. They were going to let me take drama lessons.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  “They got their own baby.”

  “But you could have helped with the new baby. Anne Shirley always helped with people’s babies,” I explained.

  “I wanted to. I said I would help, but Cathy said both of us were just too much. She said it wouldn’t be fair to me. So I went to someone else. But before I went she bought me the John Lennon hat and go-go boots.”

  “She felt sorry for you,” I said.

  “She felt guilty’s more like it,” answered Cassandra.

  “And then you came here?”

  “No. When I left Cathy’s I went… I went somewhere else. I hated it.”

  Cassandra pushed her hair back off her face for a second and I could see her eyes start to go black like Laura’s when Mrs. Butterfield hit her. I didn’t know what to do so I said, “Wait a minute,” and ran to the store, but the grocery store, not Sid’s Variety Shop, and I used my nickel to buy us a banana Popsicle. I split it on a brick, and I was happy it cracked fairsy right down the middle. We walked home, not talking, just trying to lick the drips before they dripped down our arms and made our elbows sticky.

  I asked Cassandra to play tomorrow and then I snuck away to my Sanctuary. But nothing shivery happened that night. I kept seeing how Cassandra’s eyes had gone all black and I felt heavy inside. Cassandra didn’t know anything about Anne Shirley, but I was pretty sure she knew all about Anne’s depths of despair.

  Chapter 8

  The next day I called on Cassandra Jovanovich really early. Mrs. Fergus told me to go home and come back later. They were eating breakfast. I would have eaten some of their breakfast if they’d asked me.

  I went into my backyard to the tree by the corner, where I can see into Mrs. Fergus’s kitchen if I climb to the first branch. We didn’t always have this tree and I sure couldn’t climb it when we first got it. We had just moved into our new house – and it was a new house, nobody had ever lived in it before, not like the old house we’d just left – and the backyard was just a lot of mud. My dad said we needed some trees and he knew just the place to get them. I thought we’d be going to the nursery like we did for the flowers in the front, but my dad said he had a better idea. He didn’t tell me what and by dinnertime I thought he’d forgotten, but then, when it was dark he said “Let’s go.” (I hope I don’t have to go to jail for this next part. It happened a long time ago so maybe nobody cares now.)

  My dad and I got in the Rambler, but my mother stayed home. Then we drove around the corner to the new school. My dad parked the car and we got out and went into the field. The field isn’t there anymore because lots more new houses got built. But back then it was there and there were lots of trees in it. Saplings, my dad called them. And right away he started digging, and pretty soon we carried five saplings back to the car. My dad tied down the trunk like we had a Christmas tree in it, and we drove home.

  My mother just sniffed when she saw us.

  “Aren’t you breaking the law?” she asked.

  “It’s a field, Marjorie. We didn’t steal from anyone,” my dad said.

  “Then why did you wait until it got dark?”

  My dad winked at me. “Didn’t want anyone else to steal my good idea. Let everyone go to the nursery and pay.”

  Sniff

  “And besides,” said my dad, “they’re poplars. Poplars are weed trees. You can’t steal a weed.”

  And the next day, my dad and I planted five weed saplings along one side of our yard. “Just you wait,” my dad said. “One day these will be great big trees. Lots of shade. Lots of privacy from nosy neighbors.”

  It was hard to believe him because the saplings looked so scrawny. But he was right. Weed trees grow really fast. And soon, well, in three years, we had four (one died) really nice trees. And now I can climb them and sit under them and use them to put on plays (that’s another chapter). And I feel just like Anne Shirley who named her trees and talked to them and imagined all sorts of stories about them.

  We have a really thick hedge on the other side of our yard, but my dad didn’t steal those cedars. He went out and bought them and he bought such really big ones that the nursery delivered them to our house. That’s because my dad really wanted privacy from the neighbors on that side. Not the neighbors we have now. Not the Carols and their baby. They’re nice people. But the neighbors before them were not nice. Not to me, anyway. They had a little girl named Susan who was a grade behind me. Susan didn’t play with me much to begin with. Her mother didn’t like me. She said I was forward. I looked up forward in the dictionary and the nearest I could get to what Susan’s mother meant was that I was bold or presumptuous. So then I had to look presumptuous and it meant “disrespectful behavior.” Well! I didn’t think I was presumptuous at all, but I like the word. It feels meaty. I decided to start using it myself.

  I didn’t care too much that I couldn’t play with Susan. She was dippy. She only played with her dolls and she wasn’t allowed to play games if she might get dirty. I don’t know why she couldn’t get dirty because every day at four o’clock she had to go inside to get washed for her daddy. That’s what she called him
. So did her mother. My mother calls my father your father or Earl. That’s my dad’s name. Earl. Anyway, Susan’s daddy came home at five o’clock every day and Susan had to be fresh out of the tub. And if I was playing at her house, her mother always sent me home. “Run along, Leanna. Susan’s daddy will be home momentarily.”

  My dad gets home at five o’clock every day, too, but I don’t have to wash for him. I have to wash my hands for dinner, but that’s all. And I always have a bath Saturday night to be ready for church, and I wash my face every morning, so I don’t know why Susan’s grandmother called me a dirty little girl. I think she’s inappropriate and presumptuous.

  But one day, my dad brought home a swing set for our backyard. It was bright red with two swings and a slide. And suddenly, Susan was allowed to play with me a lot more. At my house. Until I hit her. But it was an accident. She was so dippy that she stood right behind the swing. And I swung back and the metal seat hit her near her eye.

  She fell over and screamed and I jumped off the swing and before I knew what to do, her grandmother was in our backyard. She picked up Susan and said I was a horrible child, and they got Susan off to the hospital right away. She was pretty much okay, but she had to wear a patch over her eye for a few days. I wasn’t allowed to see her. When I went over to her house the next day, they sent me home and told me I couldn’t play with Susan ever again. They said I wasn’t suitable.

  Susan and her mother and grandmother and daddy moved a few months later. My mother sniffed and said, “Good riddance.” Which reminds me. I didn’t get sent to my room when I hit Susan by accident. Susan’s parents came over and told my parents that I was an “en-fun terreeebluh” and what were they going to do about it? My mother got that wormy-apple-in-the-mouth look. She just looked at my father and said, “Earl?” and then she went inside our house. My father asked Susan’s parents to get off our property and then he went inside. (I know because I just happened to be reading my book near the front window.)