by Kit Duncan
Having made a reasonably acceptable first impression on my aunt, Mama suggested I change into more casual clothes while she and Aunt Myrna drank their tea. I headed toward the basement and she stopped me and said, "No, Sweetie, I think those clothes are ready for the wash. Go put on something from your closet. Something without stains, if you please," and she smiled.
I took the Hilton book to my room and laid it carelessly on my dresser while I changed clothes. It was refreshing, liberating, getting out of the stiff dress and slip. I was sure God could not possibly be a woman or else he would never have allowed anyone to invent such itchy, uncomfortable clothing. I wondered how different the world might be if men had to wear Swiss polka dot dresses, thick slips that rustled with every move, and dainty little shiny shoes that squeaked incessantly. The only men I knew well were Papa, Father Emerson, and Mr Watson, and the thought of them dressed in such a fashion was so terrifying and disconcerting I shook the images fiercely from my head.
I sat quietly near Mama while she and Aunt Myrna sipped tea in the living room, but I was soon bored. Mama was accustomed to my restlessness but it seemed to make Aunt Myrna uncomfortable.
Still, how do you ask a small child to go away when its doting mother is sitting right next to you?
"Do you have another place you'd prefer to be?" Aunt Myrna finally asked, unable to hold back any longer. My mother was difficult to offend, and she immediately invited me to go play.
"But only in the basement," she qualified. "No need to get dirty again before supper. Papa's coming home early today."
Our basement had three main areas, and a full bath. We called the room with white tile the White Room. Not much imagination in the name, but it was descriptive. It boasted a black and white television. We were the first family on the block to own two televisions, but two years later Mr and Mrs Beasely bought the first color set on Thistlewood Drive.
We also had a hi fi record player in the White Room. Over the last twenty years my parents had accumulated a very respectable collection of LP's. Their taste in music was eclectic. They had jazz, big band, some classical, and a progressively large number of contemporary rock and roll. My mother was weak at the knees over Elvis Presley, and we had all of his records. And Andy Williams, Bobby Vee, Kitty Wells. We had everything.
A navy blue second hand couch, worn but very sturdy, was in the middle of the room. Matching end tables and lamps bordered each end of the couch. I guess that's why they called them "end tables." An overstuffed red and gold plaid colored chair, not quite as old as the couch, sat catty cornered to the couch. One wall had two long bookshelves, about five feet high each, and on top of them was a collection of fancy bottles filled with different colors of food coloring.
The books were mostly heavy, thick books. A set of Collier's encyclopedias with several yearbooks updating them. A whole row of text books from the year my dad had attended college when they lived in Chicago, years before I was born. My mother's 1943 high school dictionary. Some Red Cross booklets, Several books by Dale Carnagie, and a copy of John F Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.
There were two rows of books near the bottom: ten volumes of Collier's Children's Classics, several Cat in the Hat books, and a large red book of fairy tales called The Children's Hour.
There were six or seven books by Laura Ingalls Wilder Mama had been reading them to me since before I could remember.
A small wet bar, with a locked cabinet, sat by itself against another wall. I never saw it open, but sometimes when Papa had guests from work over to the house he would take them to the basement and they'd stay several hours.
Mama and Papa didn't drink much. I'm not sure Mama ever drank alcohol. But Papa had convinced her that there were times when it was important to his business. And so she tolerated it, and he respected her tolerance.
A large set of double glass doors, sliders, opened from the White Room onto the patio under the deck.
The room with the black tile? That was, of course, the Black Room. I preferred to play outside if at all possible but when Mama determined the weather was inclement, she insisted I play in the Black Room.
Inclement weather, to my mother, meant nearly any amount of precipitation or temperatures below 40, unless it was snowing. Snow brought the little girl out in Mama, and she would bundle up with me and we'd build snowmen and make angels on the ground, and then she'd allow me a few rides down the hill if Danny and Tommy were sledding.
I loved rain, and I loved storms. The windier the better. Mama was terrified of any wind over thirty miles per hour. Winds easing toward forty miles sent her to the basement threatening to board up the windows. So I was strictly forbidden to go outside in wet, windy weather. Windy weather under thirty miles an hour, as long as the skies were relatively clear, were okay, but add a couple of dark clouds and I was relegated to the Black Room.
It wasn't a bad room. Its only flaw was that it was inside, which, of course, being a room it could not help. So I made the best of Black Room days.
My dad had built me a large coffin-sized toy box that easily housed all manner of stuffed animals and small toys. Mama never complained if I left them lying around throughout the day, so long as I kept a narrow path between the door to the White Room and the green plastic curtain. And, of course, at the end of each day it was imperative that every toy find its respective way back to the toy box.
The rough concrete walls of the Black Room were papered with posters of the solar system and presidents, maps, the periodic table of elements, and cutouts from promotional brochures of nearly every model of Fords dating back to 1948. They meant little to me, but they did hide the ugly walls.
I've already told you about the little area behind the green plastic curtain, the Laundry Room, though it was more a corner than an actual room. To help set it off a little, Papa had tiled the floor in that corner with a lime green tile.
Predictably, we called the bathroom off the White Room the Bathroom.
My most loyal of companions was a stuffed long dog named Blackie. My choice in naming things in those days was limited to pragmatic, concrete descriptions. The dog was black. Of course, the dog's name was Blackie. His body was as long as mine until halfway through my fifth year. I kept growing; he did not. His hair became thinner, and his left ear was slightly ripped from a vigorous bout of playing fetch. I found it rather frustrating to play fetch with an inert stuffed dog but I imagined he enjoyed being tossed across the room and then retrieved. He never indicated otherwise, and he took his ripped ear in stride.
I occupied myself with quiet and sullen contemplation in the Black Room most of the rest of the afternoon. I was sitting on the floor, holding Blackie in my arms, and stroking his scarred ear with less than tender child sized fingers. With an uninterested gaze I looked blandly at the planets and the sun hanging on the wall. It wasn't very exciting but it was more colorful than the elements, and a hundred times less dull than the presidents.
"Nice room."
I jumped and whirled around, and Blackie slipped off my lap. Aunt Myrna was standing at the doorway.
"Didn't mean to startle you, Kate," she apologized, and then invited herself in.
For reasons I never really grasped, my parents had named me Katie, so I wasn't sure why my aunt called me Kate. Whether it was a mistake on her part or she just didn't feel compelled to add an unnecessary syllable, from the day she met me she nearly always called me Kate.
"I wasn't startled!" I protested. "I was just? surprised." I wasn't sure if there was an appreciable difference between being startled or being surprised, but I wanted to disagree with her. I didn't feel hateful toward her, but I was not completely won over yet.
Not that she was trying to win me over. Far from it. She had not come to the basement seeking me out to comfort me in my exile. She was just being nosey.
"I love seeing new places, don't you?" she asked. There was an old upholstered rocking chair with a swivel base near my toy box and she walked toward it to sit down. I almost warned her that it h
ad a broken gear somewhere in its innards and might tip over if she sat on it, but thankfully I caught myself.
She nearly rolled on the floor with a quick scream.
"Oh," I said with fake concern. "Did you get startled?"
She reclaimed her balance, stood up, brushed off her knees, and sat on the floor next to me. "I did not get startled," she said with a hint of huff. "I got dumped!"
Aunt Myrna did not frown, but she wasn't smiling either. She was a tough read, I was quickly learning. Still, what did it matter what she thought. She was a big old lady who was going to stay a little while and leave, and then I'd never be bothered by her again.
"How long you staying?"
"I'm staying until I'm done staying, and then I'm leaving."
"Not much of an answer, is it?" I said with a snarl.
"Wasn't much of a question. Sounded a little saucy to me," she said, her voice void of emotion.
"I just wanted to know, that's all," I pouted.
"What, you're planning on renting out the guest room?"
"Maybe."
"Uh huh."
I pouted in silence for a good five minutes. Papa had told me one of the secrets of being a good salesman, in anything, lay in the axiom, "The first one who speaks loses."
"Not really 'loses,'" he had clarified. "Not if it's a good product that will benefit the customer. More like, once your sale pitch is out there, shut up and allow your customer to sell himself."
I must have taken his lesson to heart, because I kept my mouth shut. Well, in all honesty, between you and me, I was on the verge of snapping a quick one-liner at the old lady when she finally spoke up.
"Did you know I was seven years old when your Uncle Clayton was born?" she asked.
"No," I said. I had met Uncle Clay only a few times. He lived in Indiana and we visited him one Thanksgiving, and last July 4th he and his wife had come to Louisville for a three day weekend.
"And after Clay was born here comes James a couple of years later, and then, let's see," she tapped her index finger against her temple to calculate the math. "Yes," she finally said, "it was about six years after that the twins were born. Your dad and Lonnie."
"And you were the only girl?" I asked, immediately regretting my question for fear she would interpret it as me being interested.
"Worse than that," Aunt Myrna replied. "For seven years I was the only child. Do you know how aggravating it was when all those little brats started crowding in on my turf?" She caught herself then and corrected her choice of nouns. "Not brats, no, they really weren't brats. I have to admit that. But I was seven years old and they were?."
"Unwelcome?"
"Well, yes," she laughed a little, then added quickly. "Oh, my folks wanted them alright."
"But not you?" I asked without realizing I was becoming interested in our conversation.
"No, not at first."
"How come?"
"Well, I was never really that close to my mother but I adored my dad. Even after the boys got older, he and I always enjoyed a very special rapport."
"Reaper?" I tried to repeat the word, with little success.
"Rapport," she repeated. "We got along very well. But each time there was a new baby, and especially with the twins, he made a great fuss over them. And you know, Kate, it's hard to make a great fuss over more than one person at the same time. And it can make a person pretty jealous. Whether it's over a little brother or a big aunt."
She smiled at me, but not the way a lot of adults smile down to a kid. More like the way one person smiles at another person.
"Well," she rolled forward a little in the chair, "let's see if the getting up is as easy as the getting down." It wasn't. She heaved a couple of times, and at one point I thought if I pushed against her rather voluminous bottom that might help, but I decided against it.
Finally she was upright again. "Think I'll go back upstairs and wait for your papa. Your mom says he'll be home any minute now." And she disappeared into the White Room and up the steps. I slowly picked up my toys and then held Blackie closely against my chest. I kissed his ear and placed him on the top of the pile of toys, let the lid of the toy box slam shut and raced up the stairs.
I had never seen Papa so elated as when he came home that afternoon, not even the time he sold four new Fords on the same day. The front door flew wide open and in a flurry he was laughing and hugging his sister, and marveling at how good she looked. I didn't think she looked all that grand, and while she did seem harmless enough I was stupefied why he carried on over her so much.
After supper Mama excused me from drying the dishes and I charged out the kitchen door, scanned the neighborhood from the deck, and spotted the two boys in a small thicket near the top of the hillside. Yelling "Charge!" at the top of my lungs, I hurled myself toward them. Danny and Timmy ran in opposite directions laughing in an untrue panic, and I had to decide which one to catch first. I knew Danny could outrun me so I took the road of least resistance. Moments later Timmy and I were wrestling at the bottom of the hill, near the creek bed, and Danny was standing over us daring me to come after him.
We played until the bats came out to chase moths, just as twilight was edging the color out of the day. Mr Watson came out his back door and whistled a long, strong heavy-lunged whistle, and the boys rallied toward their house immediately.
My parents' rule was that once the Watson boys were called in for the night I was to return to my yard. I could sit on the patio under the kitchen deck if I wanted, but I had to be very, very close to one of the doors.
I walked sluggishly toward the house, defeated in my ambitions by a setting sun. The yellow porch light over the patio was on and a large figure was sitting on one of the Adirondacks. The dull light cast a shadow across her face but I could see it was my aunt.
At first, I felt Aunt was an intrusion on my evening. But then, without really thinking of it, I found myself glad to see her. Not overjoyed, mind you. But glad, in a quiet way that I was yet to understand.
I sat down in the chair opposite Aunt Myrna but said nothing. Her eyes were closed and her body was limp, relaxed. I thought she might be asleep. I wondered if she was just ignoring me. I wriggled in my chair just enough to make some noise, and watched her face for signs of life. I didn't see any, so I wriggled some more.
"You move an awful lot, Kate," she said, with her eyes still closed and her face mask-like.
I wasn't sure if such an observation demanded a response or not. Not knowing what to do, I did nothing, and we sat next to each other a little while longer, she motionless with her eyes closed and me looking at her in the still, yellow light.
"It's impolite to stare, you know."
"How do you know what I'm doing?" I asked indignantly. "All I'm doing is sitting here. There's no law against that, is there? Besides, it's my house, I can do anything I want."
I realized I was inching my toe toward the line of impropriety, and it suddenly occurred to me that if she told my parents how I was speaking to her they would be unhappy. Their unhappiness, I knew, would have unhappy consequences for me. I suddenly felt very vulnerable to the power I had given this strange, big woman.
She opened her eyes and sat up in her chair a little, and looked at me blankly, contemplating her next move. She seemed to be weighing possible responses to my insolence. I imagined the worse.
"Get out of here, you rotten little brat!"
"Why don't you go play in traffic!?!"
"If you don't leave me alone, I'll snatch you bald headed!"
My imagination for my aunt's potential tirades against me was limited, though. And, as it turned out, empty. She simply said nothing, and closed her eyes again.
Well, this was getting tiresome, I thought to myself. She's old, she's fat, she sniffs books, she won't fight with me, and she's staying forever.
The screen door sliders from the White Room in the basement slid open abruptly and my parents came outside, each carrying two glasses of lemonade. I lurched forwa
rd and wondered with horror how long they had been standing there. Their smiles reassured me they had not overheard my aunt and me talking, and I signed in relief and leaned back into my chair.
"Thought you gals might be thirsty!" Mama said, handing me one of her lemonades. Papa handed his spare drink to Aunt Myrna and pulled two folding lawn chairs away from the wall. After he and Mama were settled, he asked, "So, how are you two getting along?"
"'Say 'fine,' you old bat!" I screamed in my head. Fear contorted my face. One true answer from Aunt Myrna and I'd be going to bed early for a week.
Danny and I had debated the merits and the categories of lies many times. He was one hundred percent, across the board, absolutely and irrevocably opposed to any kind of lie. No such thing as a white lie, his father had taught him. You tell the truth and take whatever comes of the truth. For me, I countered, a small, inconsequential "protective" lie could shield you from any number of minor indiscretions without interrupting your day with pesky punishments. But Danny never budged from his purist position.
I found few opportunities to lie in my day to day life, though in theory I espoused the benefits of telling lies if untidy circumstances presented themselves. But I was armed and ready, and if a dire occasion arose, I knew I could heartily, and convincingly, devise an untruthful tale.
Aunt Myrna sat up in her chair slowly, sipped her lemonade, and set it down beside her. She looked at me, no change of expression in her face. But as she spoke her face softened up incrementally, and by the time she finished her sentence she had a wry little grin creeping up the left corner of her mouth.
"Oh," she told my parents casually, "Kate and I were just discussing jurisprudence, residential ownership, and personal freedom."
My parents looked at one another, baffled. I had no idea what juries or prudence had to do with anything, but I understood immediately that Aunt Myrna had given me a reprieve from my sins.
She continued, "I was just about to tell Kate how much I was enjoying myself here, and how," she searched for the next word, found it, and continued, "how pleased I've been at her warm welcome, what with me being a stranger to her. I expect it must be a little uncomfortable getting used to a new person being around." My parents nodded and smiled at Aunt Myrna's report and empathy, and Aunt Myrna winked a twinkle of her eye at me. "Isn't that right, Kate?"
I was cornered by her affable demeanor. The only move I had left was to smile back, albeit weakly, and to mumble a barely audible, "Yes, Ma'am," though I wasn't at all sure what I was agreeing with.
I never, in the years that followed, knew Aunt Myrna to lie. But, as she demonstrated so elegantly that first night, she had a great talent for telling the truth in ways that gave the best spin possible to any situation.
Mama came into my bedroom later that night carrying our well worn copy of Little House on the Prairie. She read me a chapter each night, and sometimes two. We had already gone through the entire series several times.
I was in bed when Mama came in, though the lights were on and I was nowhere near ready to go to sleep.
"Let's say our prayers first, Honey," Mama said, and I leaped out of the bed. We kneeled together by the side of the bed, made the Sign of the Cross, recited a series of Hail Mary's, a few Our Father's, and a couple of Glory Be's for good measure. We made the Sign of the Cross again, and I hopped back into bed and pulled the covers to my chin.
She opened the book to chapter ten and had just started to read when I interrupted her.
"Mama."
"Yes, Sweetie?"
"How come Aunt Myrna doesn't like me?"
Mama closed the book in her lap and cocked her head as she studied my face. "Why in the world would you think such a thing?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said, and wished I hadn't broached the subject.
Mama thought for a minute and answered, "I think your Aunt Myrna likes you just fine, Honey."
"She doesn't talk to me like most adults. Papa's customers who come over to the house, Sister Mary Frances, Uncle Bill and Aunt Pauline, none of them."
Mama chuckled a little and said, "Well, that is true."
"So what's wrong with her?"
"Sweetie, just because she's different doesn't mean something's wrong with her."
"But she doesn't seem?."
"Katie dear," Mama stroked my forehead, "she's just not used to being around little girls, that's all."
"But Papa says she practically raised him and all his brothers."
"Girls are different."
"How?"
"Well," Mama's voice suddenly seemed very tense. "Perhaps we'll save that discussion for another day. It's a little complicated." She paused a moment, then reverted to my original question. "I think your Aunt Myrna is just a little, oh, I don't know, maybe uncomfortable around you, that's all."
"What's to be uncomfortable about?" I demanded. "I'm adorable!"
Mama laughed. "Yes, little Katie, that much is true. But you can be a handful, you know!" she laughed again, and when she quit laughing her face slowly took on a shadow of sadness. She was weighing whether or not to give me additional information.
"What?" I asked.
Mama looked down at the book and then decided, "When you're just a little older I think you'll come to understand."
"Understand what?" I said, and I knew my voice was starting to sound perilously close to insistent.
"Honey," she carelessly pushed the hair out of my eyes. "Sometimes when people get hurt, when they lose something very precious to them, it's hard to be around others who have what they've lost."
"Who lost what?" I asked.
Mama looked at me silently, thinking, and then, picking up the book, she opened it, and smiled my question away. "Let's see what little Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie are up to tonight, shall we?" And she began reading.
Laura and Mary Ingalls were the kind of kids I'd love to play with, if I had been born a few generations earlier. Baby Carrie was dull and aggravating, but thankfully, she didn't figure too prominently in most of the stories.
Mama closed the book at the end of the chapter and kissed my cheek. She stood up and was reaching to turn out the light by my bed when she noticed the old book on the dresser. She picked it up, thumbed through it, and asked, "Where in the world did you get this, Katie?"
"Aunt Myrna told me I have to read it."
"Did she, now?" Mama thumbed through the pages.
"Well, not exactly that I have to read it," I begrudgingly corrected my account.
Mama closed the book and set it gingerly back on the dresser. "You're going to love it! But you'll need to have your Webster's handy, I think," she said. She switched off the light, and closed the door behind her.
Every night, before they went to bed, my parents would crack my bedroom door a few inches and peek at me. Sometimes I was asleep, sometimes I was still daydreaming my way to a night of imagination and private adventures. But I always knew they were there.
Tonight, I figured, they would stay up later than usual. I could hear their voices up the hallway, sitting with my aunt in the living room. The words were muffled, but their tones were cheerful, the kind of sounds people make with one another when they've loved each other a long time.
I slid out of the bed and took my covers and shoved them against the base of the door. I had learned some time ago that light slips through the bottom of doors, and my parents were not fond of my turning the light on after they'd tucked me in.
I went to my dresser and reached up for Hilton's book, flipped on the small light, and sat on the floor, leaning my back against my bed. I discovered, with relief, that the first sentence of Lost Horizon contained only three words with more than two syllables. Following Sister Mary Frances' habitual advice to "sound it out, Katie Arlene, sound it out !" I was able, with just a little effort, to read all the words in the sentence but one.
"Disillusionment" stumped me, and I finally glazed over it. I got the gist of the sentence. Old friends getting together an
d discovering that they weren't as close as they once were. Idiots, I thought.
Danny and I would never be so careless. But adults, I had learned, were often careless with things of value, and then looked shocked when those things came up missing. I read on.
It took me half an hour to quietly sound out the first paragraph. The people who wrote about Dick and Jane and Sally and Spot were not burdened by packing so many sentences into a single paragraph.
I thought someone should write a letter to Mr James Hilton and suggest he read about Dick and Jane and Jane and Spot.
There were several more words, and one abbreviation, that I had to skim past, just to stay on track. I wasn't sure where my dictionary was but it wasn't in my bedroom, so, for tonight at least, I would have to plow ahead on my own.
I wondered what "the Embassy" was and why it required more than one secretary. There was only one secretary at the dealership where Papa worked. Papa had commented to Mama one evening at supper what a dear Miss Pendleton was and Mama had flashed a hard look at him, and he never mentioned her again.
I figured out that an Englishman must be a man who lived in England, but I didn't know what they had to celebrate about. I read the phrase three more times before I realized they weren't celebrating at all; they were merely celibate. Oh, I thought with fake knowledge. Is that all?
I never did figure out what an M.V.O. was. I studied this for a few minutes, and wondered, without much interest, if it was similar to a "Most Valuable Player." But that's about as far as I went with it.
"Precocious," I sounded the word out slowly until it sounded familiar. Yes, this was a word I knew. Mama had met with Sister Mary Frances one day after school and that night I had heard Mama say the word to Papa and then they had both laughed. "Precocious" must be a good word if it made them laugh.
My eyes were tiring. Satisfied that I had made a respectable dent in my new book, I set it back on the corner of the dresser, turned out the light, and tip toed to the door to retrieve my covers. Moments later I was on the eagle's nest of a nineteenth century clipper yelling "Land A'hoy!" I fell asleep before my crew and I reached the shores of Atlantis.
CHAPTER 4
