Darling Girl Read online

  It’s so hard to think about just one thing when there’s so much happening that I don’t understand. My head feels like it’s full of bees. Willa Mae’s daddy went away, and then she got a new one. I don’t want a new mama, I want my same one back. I want to help her dress and watch her sweep down the stairs like Loretta Young.

  Grampa’s calling me and getting closer. It’s funny, because he knocks on the closet door all serious and asks, “You in there?” When I tell him yes, he asks, “You coming out anytime soon?” I wonder what would happen if I said no, and just stayed in here until Mama comes back. I come out, though, because it’s Grampa, and he is the safest place I know.

  “Baseball game’s on the radio. Want to come out and listen? Cubs and Cardinals. I’m working on the car.”

  The baseball is always the Cubs and somebody, because Grampa grew up near Chicago. The car is real old, and he’s been working on it in the shed behind the house my whole life. Grampa’s workshop is kinda like Mama’s closet—it tells you who he is. The smell of it and the things you find there are all a part of him. I know where he keeps all his tools, and I help him with the car. He’s got it hooked up to a battery, and I sit in the front seat and listen to the ballgame. If he was gone, the shed is where I’d go to feel close to him.

  “Who’s winning?”

  “Nobody yet. Scoreless in the third. Cubs still have a chance.” Grampa always believes the Cubs still have a chance, no matter where they are in the standings. He says one day he’ll take me to the World Series to watch the Cubs win it all.

  He waits for me to crawl out of the closet, takes my hand, and pulls me up, not rushing, not yelling, just being. He grabs two Coca Colas on the way out through the kitchen.

  “You thinking about your mama?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know your mama loves you and wouldn’t go away if it wasn’t for the best.”

  “Yes, sir. But why, Grampa? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Your mama, I think she just feels too much. Feels everything too much. Something that doesn’t bother somebody else just breaks her, make her too sad to go on. Always did, even when she was a little girl,” he says with a sigh.

  “Will she get better?” I ask.

  “She always gets better. It just doesn’t last. It’s like having a cold in the winter that you never quite get rid of. You feel better, stop taking your medicine, and it comes right back.”

  “Can we catch it from her, like you can a cold?” I think about last winter, when me and Henry David and Samuel Taylor all had a stomach bug at the same time. Mama put us all in the big bed in her room and made Daddy sleep on the couch. She slept across the foot of the bed while we threw up and cried. She told us stories and fed us soup, and pretty soon, we all felt better. I wonder if somebody keeps her company where she is and feeds her soup and rubs her back and tells her she’ll feel better soon. I would do that for Mama, but when she feels bad enough, she always goes away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1958 — Fourth of July

  IT’S THE FOURTH OF JULY, and everybody in town is staking out their territory in the park by the bandstand. Grampa likes to go real early and find the very best spot for watching the fireworks after dark, so we’ve been here since right after lunch. I bet he’d have spent the night here if Gramma would let him.

  “The trick,” he says, “is to figure out where the middle is.”

  Figuring it out takes all kind of measuring. First, he has to see where the firemen are setting up the display and what’s on offer this year. I like the Catherine Wheels best. They look just like giant pinwheels on fire. Grampa loves them all. Once he knows where the setup is, he walks off some distances according to a plan he keeps in his head, and picks the perfect spot. We lay down our second-best quilts on the grass and settle in.

  Gramma sits in a lawn chair crocheting an afghan. Gramma’s house is knee-deep in afghans and antimacassars, all made by hand. She’s been trying to teach me to crochet, but my hands are clumsy, and I have trouble keeping the instructions in my head. Grampa and Henry David have wandered off to shake and howdy with the other early birds, Grampa being more sociable than the rest of us. The baby, Samuel Taylor, is laying on quilts and telling a long story to a leaf he’s picked up somewhere.

  I always bring a book to read. Today, it is Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. It is hot, and I am full of ham and potato salad and a little drowsy. Later, Mama and Daddy will bring fried chicken and watermelon for supper. I wonder what they are doing right now. Mama has been awful tired since she got back from resting. Nobody wants to talk about it. Except at school, Buddy Ray said she went crazy and tried to hurt herself, so I drew a picture that made him look uglier than he already is and hung it on the chalkboard.

  Soft voices and laughter float in the late-afternoon air. Critters are buzzing in the background, and birds dart here and there. A breeze ruffles my hair where it has escaped from the braids Mama and Gramma use to tame it. It’s too hot to do much of anything except lay around, and that’s what most people are doing. Some boys toss a ball, but without much energy. The band is warming up and tuning their instruments in the background, and their noise finally turns into a song I recognize.

  Grampa strolls up to Gramma sitting in her lawn chair, makes a little bow, and holds out his hand. She shakes her head no but lets herself be coaxed to her feet anyway. Grampa sweeps her into his arms, and they begin to waltz a tight little circle in one corner on the second-best quilts. I watch as they dance and Grampa sings in a quiet voice, “Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde, and the band played on.”

  Gramma’s a little bit taller than Grampa, but you don’t usually notice it. It doesn’t show now as they dance because she rests her head lightly on his shoulder. Just for a minute, I see them as they are in the old pictures we look at, and as they must have been when Gramma was a strawberry blonde and rolled her stockings and rouged her knees, and Grampa wore a pork pie hat and a coonskin coat. Before Grampa’s heart attacks and Gramma’s anger. Before they were anybody’s Gramma and Grampa.

  When the music stops, she pushes him away and says, “Don’t be silly, Ned!” Grampa just grins and lets her go. He strolls off on his rounds, still singing: “…his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded, and the band played on.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1958 — Moving Around

  BECAUSE DADDY IS A PIPELINER, we move all the time. Before I started school, we moved every time the warehouse moved, which was as often as every three weeks. Pipelining is the most important job in the world, because you wouldn’t have gas for your car or water or gas for heating and cooking, which is not the same kind of gas as gasoline without it. My daddy’s job is the most important of all, because he’s project manager. Whenever there’s a war, my daddy works for the government, but not just in the army or anything ordinary. His work is secret. Grampa works for him and manages the warehouse, which travels along the line and moves every few miles.

  We keep a home place in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans near Mandeville, but we only live there when I go school, or when we can’t follow where Daddy is working. Gramma and Grampa live in the next little town down the road a couple of miles. Gramma says we shouldn’t travel so much, because we have too many little kids, and that makes it hard for Mama. Mama says it’s not like we aren’t always going to have a baby, so that shouldn’t keep us from traveling with Daddy.

  And anyway, we take a house with us. A house-trailer, big and shiny, that we pull right behind the car, or that Daddy has somebody pull behind a truck if he can’t be with us on the road. In the summertime, we don’t go on vacation, we go live somewhere new. It’s easy if you have a trailer house. When it is time to move, we just duct-tape all the cabinets and closets and drawers shut so our stuff doesn’t fall out, and we hit the road. Mama has a whole extra house full of stuff like sheets, towels, dishes, and pots and pans that just stay in the trailer all the time. At the house, we drape old sheets on everything to keep the dust off when we’re gone, and in the trailer, we just take the tape off everything when we are ready to move in. Gramma and Grampa have a little trailer that Grampa can pull right behind the Desoto.

  When we get to where we’re going, there’s usually a trailer park where people already live, or the company sets up a lot with everything we need, like electricity and water. Sometimes the towns are littler or bigger than ours, but none of them are close to a big city as special as New Orleans.

  You can almost tell if a town will be friendly or not by where we set up the trailers. If it is way out of town, close to the pipeline, we know the people in town want nothing to do with us except for what Gramma calls floozies, which I think must mean real friendly ladies. They come out and visit the men living on their own who must be awful sad missing their families. Sometimes, there’s other families with kids we can play with, but mostly not. Mama says it’s better if we don’t play with the other company families, since Daddy is the boss and the welders or somebody are always on strike.

  If the people in town are friendly and the town is big enough, sometimes we don’t even need the trailers, because they rent houses and rooms to us. But lots of little towns aren’t so friendly. They don’t want us to play with their kids or go to their stores or live anywhere near them. They don’t trust people who move around a lot, and think everyone should live in the same town where they were born their whole life. I’ve never even visited the town where I was born. Daddy and Granny can’t even remember the name of the town where he was born. Mama says being well-traveled makes you a more interesting person, so I guess that’s us. Other people call us ugly names, like gypsies and trailer trash. Mama says they are just ignorant, and that we should try to understand that people who haven’t been anywhere
don’t know any better. Mama says it is just best if we keep to ourselves. Then there won’t be any problems.

  The trailer has all kinds of hiding places in it. Mamma and Daddy have a bedroom with an accordion door just like the instrument, but it doesn’t make music. It fastens with a strap, and snaps right to the wall. I want a door like that on my bedroom at home, but Mama says no. Our beds are in the hallway and lift up so our clothes can be stored underneath them. The baby sleeps in the port-a-crib, which usually stays in the back seat of the car but comes inside the trailer when we’re not driving. It sits right in the kitchen, once you fold the dinner table up against the wall.

  The best part of the trailer is that the sofa opens out into a bed. Sometimes, if we are really good, Mama lets us sleep in the sofa bed. It has a storage space up underneath it that you can get to from inside or outside. Whenever people come to visit, especially town people, I feel like we have secrets they’ll never understand, because they live in plain houses with ordinary furniture and closets. For now, while they still fit, Henry David and Samuel Taylor sleep end-to-end in the bed in the hall across from me. Everything is so snug, just like a dollhouse. Mama says it is perfect, because there is even room for a rocking chair. She says the only problem is that if she is going to sweep she has to pile us up on the furniture so she doesn’t sweep all her children away with the mud that Daddy tracks in.

  Sometimes, the towns we live in are so small or so unfriendly that we make our own entertainment. If Daddy is working late, Mama and some of the other wives load up the kids and we go to the drive-in movies, if there’s one close enough. If it is a double screen, where you can see the movie at both ends of the parking lot, we put the back seats down in somebody’s station wagon and all the kids lay in the way back and watch the movie. You just fall asleep there and wake up in your own bed like magic.

  The single men and the married men whose families aren’t with them all live together, away from the rest of us. Sometimes they drink beer and make too much noise—that’s why we live apart from them. Both Mama and Gramma made us promise never to go near their trailers, and not to talk to the floozies. I think that’s a shame, because most of the floozies are real friendly and real pretty, too. Some of them sit out in lawn chairs in the shade near the men’s trailers, talking and laughing and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer right out of the bottle. They watch the wives hauling groceries and hanging laundry, but they don’t ever speak to them. Some of the floozies have been with us for a couple of warehouse moves. They don’t go to church and sometimes are sitting and smoking, still not dressed, just wearing silky wrappers, fuzzy mules dangling off their painted toes, when we get back from Sunday dinner.

  If there are enough of us and we are going to be there for a while, Daddy has Grampa and some of the men lay down a good-sized concrete slab, put up an open shed, and run water and electricity to it. Then they stick a couple of washing machines in there so the wives don’t have to take the laundry into town. Grampa also strings up clotheslines so they can hang laundry, rain or shine. The ladies and the floozies all like that, and fuss over him and bring him food Gramma won’t let him eat because of his bad heart.

  Grampa comes over after dinner almost every Saturday night whether we are home or on the road, because Gramma only wants to watch Dragnet and Perry Mason and Grampa likes to watch variety shows where you get to see singers and dancers and plate-spinners and sometimes a ventriloquist or dogs that wear clothes and dance. Grampa’s favorite show is beauty pageants. He almost always picks the winner every time. Grampa does admire a pretty girl.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1959 — Train Station

  I LIKE TO GO DOWNTOWN to the train station no matter who we’re picking up. It’s always cool in there, and a little darker than the outside. At the top of the stairs, my daddy asks how many, and since I forgot I was supposed to count, I say eleven, my favorite number, and he just says, “uh huh,” which means he didn’t count, either, so I’m not in trouble for not paying attention again, because none of my grownups are paying much attention these days.

  I don’t understand why they put all these steps up on the outside and more steps going down to the platforms on the inside, when they could’ve just built it all on one level and saved everybody a whole lot of trouble, but I don’t tell my daddy because I’m not supposed to worry about stuff like that.

  “Evening, Roscoe.”

  “Evening, Mr. Pete. Evening, Miss DG. Y’all got company coming?”

  I like Roscoe, and I wish my daddy wore a uniform to work like he does, instead of just a shirt and tie. I like the way Roscoe says “DiGi,” stretching it out like a real name and not just like initials, DG, which it is. Roscoe touches the brim of his cap and bends just a little at the waist.

  I say, “Evening, Roscoe” back to him, and nod my head like grownup ladies do and try to remember all the stuff I’m not supposed to do, like call him Mister or curtsy or ask how he keeps his teeth so white.

  “Train from Chicago on time, Roscoe?” my daddy asks.

  Roscoe says, “Yes, sir, Mr. Pete. Due in at 8:59. Your mama coming for a visit?”

  My daddy nods yes and helps me scoot up on the bench. I’m busy arranging skirts and petticoats so nothing wrinkles and trying to figure out a way to tell if you really can see my underwear in my patent leather shoes, which Gramma’s always warning me about. My daddy sits down beside me, stretches out his long legs, and pushes his hat back on his head just a little.

  “Roscoe, you got a girl can help my mama?”

  When we live up north, my daddy hires a maid, but here at home, somebody comes in to help. The only difference I can tell is what we call the women who come to work. We didn’t have any help before my mama had to go away, and I think my daddy feels bad about that on account of her being so tired, and he wants to be sure she doesn’t get that way again.

  Roscoe’s thinking real hard about what my daddy asked him, and he’s trying to figure out if he knows anybody he can get to work for Granny, because she about ran through all his relatives last time she was here. My daddy even had to promise Franklin, Roscoe’s boy who plays baseball for the colored school, that he can come do the yard work on Sunday mornings when Granny’s in church, so he won’t have to see her all summer.

  “I’ll send somebody over in the morning, Mr. Pete. I can find somebody your mama can’t run off.” Roscoe grins real big, and he and my daddy laugh, but I’m not so sure Roscoe knows anybody my Granny can’t run off.

  Roscoe checks his pocket watch and squints, comparing it with the big clock on the wall, and says, “Train’s coming, Mr. Pete. We best get ready.” My daddy puts his hands on his knees and pushes himself up kind of slow. He turns and picks me up under the arms and swings me onto Roscoe’s cart.

  “Hold on tight, Miss DiGi,” says Roscoe, and I grab the bar between his big hands, and he pushes off and we sail down the platform toward the light.

  This is my favorite part, the train coming in. I see the light moving closer, the noise gets louder and louder, and the screeching starts, and I wonder if the brakeman ever just forgets and lets the train keep running right on through to New Orleans and on without stopping, right on into the ocean.

  Roscoe and my daddy are leaning in toward each other and laughing at something I can’t hear, because now I have my hands over my ears. The train’s so loud, and steam is billowing everywhere like a dragon in one of the stories my mama reads me, huge and fierce and loud and scary, and just for a minute, I miss my mama awful, so awful my stomach hurts, but the train just goes slower and slower and the noise gets louder and louder and the steam thicker and thicker.

  My daddy leans over, hollers, “You ready?” and lifts me down off the cart. It’s my job to get Granny.