Marguerite (New Baby excerpt)
My own real Mamma came home today! I was in the dining room when she came through the front door all dressed up with high heel shoes and a jacket. She bent down on one knee, red lipstick and green eyes through the tiny veil that came part-way down her cheek. I froze still, not even trying to say. Beautiful princess! I never recognized her before! It was bright all around her and she looked at me straight in the face and let her fingers touch the back of my hand. She's happy to see me! It's a surprise when a beautiful person knows you and when you are noticed by them! Like being taken suddenly into a silken cocoon!
A lot of other ladies had come with her. They pressed against one another in the arched doorway. They couldn't wait! They wanted to be with her, too! The excited faces moved closer and smiled down at us.
It was sunshining that day.
A big clothes basket was carried in, with a frilly white skirt on it and they set it against the wall behind my bed. Inside they put a soft-wrapped bundle. They said it was called Bobby. I pulled back the edge of the blanket to have a look. It wasn't anybody I knew, not even like a real person that should have a name. I held my hand against the side of the blanket. It felt too warm and smelled funny.
I stand on tiptoe to look over the edge of the table where Bobby is being changed. He is smaller than me and made different. There is a big bag of squishy stuff at the top of his legs instead of a regular bottom. Momma washes it off softly with a wet cloth. Nobody mentions it or acts as if they're worried.
She loves the baby. She carries him around on her side while she cleans the house and talks little baby words to tell him. She strokes his cheek while she holds the warm milk bottle high for him to drink and then pats and rubs his back gently to burp. She loves washing his rosy plump body. The smell of it fills her with happiness. When he smiles, red-faced, and fills the fresh diaper with another smell entirely, she pretends to scold in a teasing voice as she tenderly cleans him up again. He's built sturdy and strong like Grandpa.
Bobby is lying on a big blanket in the middle of the dining room floor. The sun is shining in on him from the window at the side. He is all dressed up in a new baby suit. There are quite a few women in the room, standing around the blanket, some with babies of their own in their arms. Bobby coos and gurgles and kicks his chubby legs in the air. The women echo the sounds back to him and to each other. They laugh admiringly. The room fills with their murmuring. I stand behind their circle, watching. My eyebrows pucker up and I try to figure out. How does he do it?
Something changed after this. Maybe it's because of how she looked at me that day. Maybe it's because of the boy baby or because we moved away from the farm and I don't go to the fields with my dad any more. There is new person in our house. He is a boy and we are going to live in another house in Damascus.
Kids weren’t encouraged to drink water. It’s just another way of asking for attention and, besides, they only have to go to the toilet more often. So it was good when we moved to Damascus. I was four by then and could reach the handle on the pump in the kitchen sink by myself. It was a little hard to pump with one hand and hold the glass steady under the spout with the other one so to begin with I put the glass down in the sink about where I expected the water to land and used both hands to pump. I raised the handle high as I could and brought it down hard. A splendid rush of water gushed from its shiny zinc mouth. Whoops! Have to be more careful; the water splashes everywhere!
I was supposed to help take care of company. Most weekends somebody or other came, aunts and uncles or friends. That’s how I got into trouble. Lee, one of the friends, well, more like the husband of Frances who everybody liked but he was a sort of picky fussy person without much interesting to say, Lee came into the kitchen where the women were making sandwiches up at the other end. He fussed around the sink. Lots of dishes and glasses standing in it. Kids running in and out. So I said did you want something in perticular? I said “in particular” because I knew my dad didn’t like him and because he never listened to my stories.
He said he’d like a glass of water, please. I thought that’s strange since the pump was right there and there were a lot of glasses, but my job was to take care of things so I picked up a glass from the sink (looked like one of the kids had had some milk in it) and performed my expert pumping operation. I handed him the glass of pale white water. He held back a minute, then took it between his thumb and first finger, not the one with the ring on, and moved it carefully away from him like it’s gonna bite.
“Don’t be a sissy,” I confidently repeated my father’s hearty growl. “It’ll put hair on your chest!” I must have hit a nerve somewhere because he turned sort of white himself and was just about to drink it anyhow when Mom saw. She flew across the kitchen, scarcely touching the floor, and snatched the glass from his hand all in one swoop. Flustered, red-faced. “What’s the matter with that girl!” grabbing the glass. Then taking a sparkling clean glass from the top shelf, she filled it for him and dried the bottom with a new dish towel from the drawer. He didn’t say a word.
“Of all the people to pull a stunt like that with!” she mourns next day. “Where was your head?” Daddy looks around the edge of the Sunday paper and scrunches up his eyes.
Damascus was a few houses clustered at the sides of the paved road leading into Salem. A garage, a general store. Mamma likes it here. For one thing, it isn’t a farm and, for another, her mother-in-law has never been here. In fact, it’s almost town! A streetcar runs along tiny tracks high behind the row of houses. Ten minutes into Salem. Light and new-painted like a toy, we play a game of climbing aboard and riding happily into town, Mamma in a little veiled hat and matching high-heel shoes. She wears size four and gets the sample shoes they show in store windows for almost nothing. She likes having small feet and having this special trick.
If there’s money enough, we go to the picture show. Two to choose from but the good ones are at the State; a block further down, the Mercury has the cowboys and scary stuff. We don’t go to the Mercury. She scratches right down into the bottom of her purse. I get in for free but she’ll have to pay a dime herself. Don’t tell Daddy. She was disgusted when I got too big to shrink down to look like six. I scowled. They know I’m lying. The woman looks down at me from her glass cage with a little mouth and little eyes.
I liked it in Damascus., too. As soon as it was Spring, I went outdoors all by myself and here was the big sunshine and all these kids! There was a bunch of them, all sizes, and they didn’t care at all that I was littler than them. They already knew so many things to do!
The best thing was going to the barn, a ramshackle building behind the row of houses. The doors were wide open and there were only a few bales of hay and some empty drums and lots of straw all over the floor. A high raised platform at one end. We swarmed in, me running to keep up, already starting hide-and-seek or tag or grocery store. Then somebody decided we could put on a play! We would go down every day to practice and it would be up on the stage and we would charge a penny for people to come and everybody could bring a chair to sit on.
I could bring one, too, because I had a new wagon to carry it. Daddy had brought it home in the front yard and told me come out and I was so surprised, I just stood still and didn’t think it was for me! It was shiny and very red! He showed me how to hold the handle in the same direction you want to go when you back up. But if you sit inside, you put it in the opposite direction! Very fancy! After that, it went with me everywhere. It had to hide with me for hide-and-seek, and deliver the groceries in playing store and it had to go on the stage if I did! I knew one piece to say.
(Hands on hips, head on one side and eyebrows up to make a question.)
“Little fly upon the wall,
Ain’t you got no clothes at all?
Ain’t you got no petti-skirt?
Ain’t you got no shimmy shirt?
Gee, ain’t you cold?”
They said all right, you can say it.
Late in the afternoon when the yellow sun was making the inside of the barn all yellow, too, and there were drifting little yellow dusts all in the air ‘cause we had been running and hollering so much, somebody yelled, “The Gypsies are coming!” and all the kids except me ran away quick and I was left in the barn. Me and the wagon couldn’t run very fast. We’d have to hide! I pulled a feed barrel on its side, put the wagon behind it and crawled inside. Very still, breathing just softly so I could hear when the Gypsies came. I knew what to look for; they were great dirty blackish people who stole things and took little children away and you never got to come home again. They liked to do it. I couldn’t hear anything. Maybe they had got one of the other kids and gone home. Maybe Johnny. I thought about playing without Johnny and that was okay.
It was getting hot and sweaty but I tried not to move. I peeked out of the open end of the barrel. The sunshine wasn’t coming straight down from the window any more but was lying slantways across the floor. Everything was quiet. Is that the way they trick you? Nobody around… No kids, no Gypsies...I picked up the tongue of the wagon and headed around the block toward home. My tummy felt kind of squiggly. They might be still looking for me! Maybe everybody else knew to keep on hiding!
When I came in the back door, my mother was at the kitchen sink peeling things.
"Where have you been?" she frowned at me sideways. I was a little scared to explain about the Gypsies (us kids never talked to grownups about them) but I had to say why I was at the barn too long so I said about being inside the barrel. Mamma stopped peeling and put her wet hands on her hips.
"Humph!" she said, drying her hands on the kitchen towel as she left the potatoes. She reached with one hand for the clean apron and flew out the front door. In a few minutes she was back at the sink peeling even faster. That night after supper, the mothers stood beside the road at the front of our house. The sun shone red up one side of their faces from a low corner of the sky, darkness creeping up from the ground. They leaned their heads together in a circle and floated on the warm night air.
Next day there wasn’t play practice any more. The rickety old door of the barn was propped shut with a piece of wood and Jeffrey Stratton says we’re not allowed to go in there any more and he can’t come to play with me either. He turns his head around both shoulders like if anybody’s watching and shoves off on his bike down the street.
It always changes.
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