Lizzie's Carefree Years

by Linda Byler

  They were sitting on the front steps, eating a Grandpa cookie with fresh vanilla icing on it. The icing was actually pink, but that was because Mam had put red food coloring in it. She was baking them, and Debbie, Jeanie, Lizzie, and Mandy were all eating their second cookie. Grandpa cookies were best if they were still warm, so Mam spread icing on them, making sure they could all have one. They were actually a sugar cookie, so Lizzie never did find out why they were called “Grandpa cookies.”

  “We could sleep out in the playhouse on Friday evening, because there’s no school Saturday,” Debbie said.

  “If it stays warm like this,” Lizzie said, stuffing the last of the cookie in her mouth. Debbie finished hers, wiped her mouth with her sleeve, and looked over at Lizzie.

  “How many cookies do you think your mom would let us have?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I could eat another one.”

  “We can ask.”

  So they all got up and asked Mam if they were allowed another cookie.

  “You’ll ruin your supper,” Mam said, but she was smiling, which meant they were allowed one more.

  “Thank you, Annie,” Debbie said.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Glick,” Jeanie said.

  Lizzie and Mandy didn’t say anything, because it was their Mam and their cookies. But Lizzie was glad Mam made good cookies, so Debbie would like her.

  They all sat back down on the steps, eating another cookie, except Mandy, who said she would have to throw up if she ate one more. Lizzie envied Mandy’s ability to stop eating after one cookie. She often wished she was thin like her, but could never survive on as little as Mandy ate, or so she thought.

  “We’ll bring our sleeping bags and pillows,” Debbie said.

  “We have to ask Mam,” Lizzie informed her.

  “Why didn’t we ask when we got another cookie?” Debbie asked.

  So they all got up, and walked across the porch and into the kitchen. They leaned against the table, watching Mam. Her face was flushed from the heat of the woodstove, as she slid a spatula under a big, round cookie, expertly loosening it from the aluminum cookie sheet. She flipped them on an old plaid tablecloth that was spread on top of the plastic one. Emma was spreading the icing on top of the cookies that had cooled sufficiently, whistling under her breath.

  The kitchen was bathed in the yellow glow of the late afternoon sun. It caught the gleam of the light oak kitchen cabinets, reflected on the windows, and made the top of the wood-fired range sparkle. There was a pot of meat bubbling on the back of the stove, which smelled almost better than the cookies.

  Emma was growing up. She was about the same height as Mam, and a lot slimmer. She had steadily lost a few pounds every month, and now she looked almost like a young girl that went to the singing. It just gave Lizzie the blues, watching Emma expertly spread icing on cookies, looking so slim and grown up.

  “Mam, may we sleep in the playhouse tonight?” she asked, turning to look at her.

  “Tonight?” Mam asked.

  “It’s not too cold at all,” Mandy chimed in.

  “We’re not sleeping there tonight,” Debbie said. “You forgot. Not till Friday night.”

  Mam looked a bit dubious, but she allowed the girls to sleep there, as long as the weather did not turn colder. Debbie was thrilled, saying she’d bring Pepsi to drink and they would make hot dogs on an open fire if Dat would allow them to.

  Mam smiled, listening to the girls’ plans. Winter would soon be upon them, so if these balmy Indian summer days lasted, they may as well enjoy them.

  So Friday night after the laundry was brought in, folded, and put away, Lizzie and Mandy were free to go.

  They swept the playhouse clean, arranging sleeping bags and old quilts and square pillows and oblong ones, anything they might need to be comfortable on a chilly night. The one window was broken out and there was no screen, so they worried about the cold night air coming in.

  When Debbie and Jeanie came over, they didn’t seem to think the window would be much of a problem. The air was not chilly at all, the decided together, and since the playhouse was close to the low branches of the trees in the fencerow, it was almost like a screen across it.

  Debbie brought two sleeping bags, one for her and one for Jeanie. They stored the cooler with cans of Pepsi and ice in the low cupboard, arranged their ketchup and mustard around it, and went to the house to find Dat.

  “Now everybody be quiet, and let me ask Dat,” Mandy said.

  Lizzie did not agree. “Mandy, you know if Debbie asks Dat, we’ll be allowed to much sooner.”

  “I’m not asking,” Debbie said, rolling her brown eyes.

  “He’s not going to let you, Lizzie, ’cause you’re always asking to do crazy things,” Mandy said seriously.

  “Let’s just all go in together,” Debbie suggested.

  They found Dat sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper.

  “Dat, we need to ask you a question,” Mandy blurted out. “I mean, we’re about positive you’re going to say no, but would we…”

  “Are we allowed to start a fire in the yard to roast hot dogs?” Lizzie broke in.

  Dat shook his head. “Not in the yard.”

  “Where else?” Lizzie asked.

  “It’s much too dry to start a fire in the yard. You’d ruin the grass, anyway. No, certainly not. Why do you have to start a fire in the yard?” He returned to the newspaper, paging through it as if the conversation was over.

  Debbie looked at Lizzie, raising her eyebrows. Lizzie pushed back a strand of brown hair nervously, cleared her throat, and began. “Dat, you don’t understand. Debbie and Jeanie are allowed to stay overnight, and we want to have a hot dog roast for our supper. We don’t want to cook the hot dogs on top of a pan in here,” she said, lifting both hands with the palms up.

  Dat put down the newspaper. He looked at Lizzie before he said, “I guess not. You can’t make hot dogs on top of a pan.”

  Debbie giggled out loud, and Mandy slapped Dat’s arm.

  “Where else?”

  “I guess if you clear away the weeds and stay away from the trees you can lay concrete blocks in a square and build a small fire. But just enough to roast your hot dogs, and you have to make one for me. I like them burned.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Glick!” Debbie called back, as everyone rushed to get out the door and start the fire.

  First, they found a spot close to the playhouse, but not in the yard. They cleared away all the weeds and leaves, until the brown dirt showed through. Mandy and Jeanie collected kindling from the wood house while Debbie and Lizzie hauled eight concrete blocks from the pile behind the barn. They were heavy, and filled up the wooden wagon almost to capacity. They pulled it across the lawn and arranged the blocks carefully around the dirt area.

  “Newspaper!”

  “Oh, we forgot newspaper!”

  Mandy was off across the lawn, her heels flying, as she dashed up the steps to the kitchen.

  “We don’t have matches.”

  “Matches!”

  Jeanie raced across the yard, as fast as she could go, her little brown feet propelling her chubby legs. She took the steps as fast as she could, meeting Mandy on the porch. Together they went back to the kitchen for matches.

  Debbie crumpled the newspaper, and Lizzie arranged slivers of wood on top. With a few attempts, the match ignited, the flame burning quickly, consuming the newspaper. They waited breathlessly, hoping the wood would catch fire as well, but the paper curled into thin black nothingness, with the wood still lying on top.

  “That wasn’t so great!” Debbie said.

  “Use more newspaper,” Mandy said, starting to crumple a sheet. So they tried again, using lots and lots of paper, and only the smallest slivers of kindling. The flame licked greedily at the paper, quickly turning quite hot, and as they all watched anxiously, the kindling turned red, crackling into flames as well.

  Lizzie reached for larger pieces of
wood, but Mandy grabbed her hand, saying, “Not too much!” So Lizzie added smaller pieces, watching them burn before she added larger ones.

  The sun was sliding behind the mountain, casting a shadow across the playhouse and fencerow. But the fire crackled merrily, illuminating their faces with an orange glow. Jeanie backed away, wiping her eyes, waving her arms, and saying, “Make the smoke go away!”

  They laughed and went to find sticks to sharpen, then they speared the hot dogs on the end. They all sat around the cheery little fire, balancing their hot dogs carefully, so they wouldn’t get burned. All except Lizzie, who was making one for Dat. She held it much lower, until it was burned completely black, then put it on a roll, added ketchup and mustard, and dashed across the yard.

  After she returned, she burned another one for herself. Debbie and Jeanie had already eaten one before Lizzie’s was finished, but they soon started on the second hot dog. They drank their Pepsi, tears forming in Lizzie’s and Mandy’s eyes, because they hardly ever drank it. They blinked, trying to hide it, but Debbie laughed at them.

  “So, maybe you don’t drink Pepsi very often, but your mom bakes!” she said.

  It was getting dark in earnest now, and they moved closer to the friendliness of the crackling fire. They ate hot dogs until they could eat no more, and sat back on the grass contentedly. A few birds twittered good-night to each other in the branches, and the fire died down to red coals.

  “Let’s tell spooky stories!” Debbie said.

  “You say the first one,” Lizzie said, suppressing a burp. Pepsi was so good, except it always made her burp, which was embarrassing.

  So Debbie launched into a story about two people being lost on a mountain. The story became so frightening, with Mandy’s eyes becoming steadily bigger and rounder, until Lizzie could stand it no longer.

  “Debbie, I guarantee you that story isn’t true,” she said, defending Mandy.

  “Yes, it is. I saw it on TV.”

  “That’s too scary. You have to say something else.”

  “Would you rather hear about ghosts?”

  “No!”

  “There is such a thing as ghosts,” Debbie said.

  “That’s not true, Debbie. And if you don’t quit saying things like that, I’m going to go in and not sleep in the playhouse ever again. I mean it.”

  That was one thing Lizzie could not think about ever. Ghosts. If there was such a thing as a ghost, the whole world would never be safe, because they could walk through walls. Mam had told her it wasn’t true, and she shouldn’t worry or think about such silly things. But Lizzie often imagined ghosts walking around out in the cornfield, until she was so afraid she had to hold a pillow over her head to go to sleep.

  And now, here they were, sleeping in the playhouse, and Debbie had to bring up that ghost subject. “Let’s stop telling spooky stories and go inside in our sleeping bags,” she said, rubbing her arms and shivering.

  “No, not yet. We didn’t toast our marshmallows!” Debbie announced. Jeanie produced a bag of marshmallows, and Debbie threw a few sticks of wood on the fire.

  Marshmallows were funny things. You could only hold one over the fire for a very short time, before it erupted into a little fire of its own. Then you had to blow on it as hard as you could if you wanted to save any of it at all. The best thing to do with marshmallows was put them between two Ritz crackers with peanut butter on them. But they didn’t have any, so they just ate the hot marshmallows off the stick, yelping as it stuck to their mouths, burning their tongues.

  “Oh, I know a really scary story. Did you know that in Alaska they found tracks as big as a sofa? They say there’s a creature roaming the snowy landscape that’s bigger than a house. Nobody knows for sure where it came from or what it looks like. They just know there’s a huge creature walking around. They call him Bigfoot,” Debbie said.

  Lizzie’s eyes narrowed, and she slowly swallowed the rest of her marshmallow. She was sick to her stomach immediately. “W-w-where did you hear such a thing?” she quavered.

  “My mom saw it in the paper. She was laughing about it, but my grandmother says if there were tracks in the snow, something had to make them.”

  “It was probably an extra, extra, outsized polar bear,” Mandy said sensibly.

  “The only thing is, a group of hunters think they saw him, and it’s like a huge human looking kind of thing, with a bear’s head,” Debbie explained.

  Lizzie became chilled all over. What an awful thought! She shivered. Surely there was no such thing. She wished she could ask Mam if there was something like that, or if God didn’t make all the animals for sure.

  “Well, whatever it was, it’s not here in Pennsylvania,” Mandy said, being very grown up and wise.

  Lizzie looked quickly behind her. She thought she had heard a rustling in the fencerow. “I’m going to bed!” she announced shrilly, her eyes darting from one side to the next.

  “What about the fire?” Debbie asked.

  “It’ll burn out—it’s not windy,” Lizzie called back, already halfway through the playhouse door.

  The other girls giggled and laughed, arranging pillows and blankets to suit themselves. Mandy put the marshmallows, ketchup, mustard, and hot dog rolls in the cupboard, checking the ice in the cooler to see if the leftover hot dogs were still cold.

  Lizzie rolled herself in an old quilt, turned her face to the wall, and felt quite sick. Wouldn’t it be just horrible to see a huge white creature come walking down the road, stopping to peer in the upstairs windows? She couldn’t believe it. She tried to think of other things, but her imagination conjured up vivid images of creatures she wasn’t absolutely certain did not exist. She wished Debbie would not have said that. That was the trouble with English children. Nothing scared them—not one thing.

  Suddenly she sat up, glared at Debbie, and said, “I’m going to go sleep in my room if you don’t stop saying those things about creatures and ghosts. None of it is true.”

  “No one knows for certain, Lizzie,” Debbie said.

  “Well, I do,” Lizzie huffed.

  “Why don’t you just go to sleep, and the rest of us will play tic-tac-toe?” Debbie asked.

  So Lizzie flounced back on her pillow, turned her back, and closed her eyes, while the others pulled up a small table, turned on the battery-powered flashlight, and played tic-tac-toe. They giggled and teased each other so much that Lizzie had to smile in spite of herself. When Debbie pounced on her and pulled off her quilt, Lizzie sat up and pulled her hair. Then they forgot all about Bigfoot and ghosts, having a wonderful time playing games and eating marshmallows out of the bag until they could no longer stay awake.

  When Jeanie’s head began to nod and the flashlight turned a bit dim, they wearily crawled under their quilts and sleeping bags. With a tired sigh, Lizzie clicked off the flashlight and they all settled themselves comfortably.

  “G’night!” Debbie whispered.

  “G’night. Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Mandy answered.

  “They will in here!” Jeanie giggled.

  Silence fell over the playhouse, as, one by one, the girls drifted off to dreamland. Their shoulders rose and fell, and small snores punctuated the stillness of the soft night. The three-quarter moon rose grandly above the mountain, the shadows changing with a small whisper of a breeze. A tractor and trailer hummed along the highway, and a bat swooped under the pole light, catching an unwary moth.

  As the girls slept peacefully, two of Old Mary’s gray cats and two of the Zeiglers’ white cats prowled in the dark. As is the nature of cats, they eventually began to chase each other, racing across the lawn, with two of the white cats clawing their way up the trees of the fencerow, where they sat, hissing at the unfriendly intruders. Old Mary’s cats were not about to give up the fight. They started climbing the trees as well.

  The girls were terrified to be awakened in one whirl of a hissing, scratching, and meowing cluster of fighting cats. They screamed. The cats fought.


  Lizzie jumped up, grabbing a pillow and beating the cats, while Debbie grabbed the flashlight. Mandy and Jeanie screamed and cried, while Lizzie danced around the interior of the playhouse, whopping anything that moved with the soft pillow, yelling hoarsely all the while. In the melee that followed, Lizzie accidentally knocked Jeanie’s head against the wall with her pillow, which elevated her screaming to an ear-piercing wail. She grabbed her pillow, still crying, and ran home all by herself.

  After the cats finally found the door, they all raced in different directions, their hair standing on end. The girls’ screams ended in hoarse breathing. They were shaking all over. Lizzie sagged weakly to her knees and Mandy collapsed on top of her sleeping bag.

  “What was that all about?” Debbie asked shakily.

  “Cats! Jim Zeigler’s cats!” was all Lizzie could say.

  “Where’s Jeanie?”

  “She ran home.”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “I’m never going to sleep in this dumb playhouse again as long as I live.”

  “We should have put a screen across the window.”

  “Let’s go in.”

  “Let’s do.”

  Grumbling, they grabbed their flashlights and pillows, mumbling and complaining their way across the moon-drenched yard.

  “Whose idea was it to sleep out there?”

  “Yours.”

  “Hah-ah. Yours.”

  “Be quiet.”

  They opened the door quietly, padding silently across the kitchen floor. The old platform rocker was creaking, with Mam rocking one of the twins. She looked so peaceful, half asleep, rocking in the moonlight.

  “Who goes there?” she whispered, a smile in her voice.

  “Us.”

  “What happened?” Mam asked, holding the baby to her shoulder.

  “Jim Zeigler’s cats had a fight with Old Mary’s, and they fell through the open playhouse window.”

  “Right on top of us!”

  “Where’s Jeanie?”

  “She ran home.”

  Mam started to say something, then sputtered, threw back her head, and laughed softly. The baby on her shoulder shook silently as Mam laughed helplessly. She lifted one hand and let it fall on her knee.